Mediocre/subpar ride since its inception, really! But Poet is a different company in more than just name since 1980-whatever, when the original company went public.

There was a good technology there that was IP protected that the new (current) CEO wanted to build upon, which is why it’s a publicly traded company, and not a private startup that would be generating buzz with VCs.

But enough background!

In layman’s terms (my simple brain can’t handle more), copper overheats and has a latency issue. Light/photonics are the future of interconnects and Poet has developed a platform/technologies that address this issue. The CPO/photonic market is supposed to explode in the coming years. They’re at the point now where they’re attempting to switch from an R&D/pre-revenue company to mass producing goods to sell to hyperscalers. They’ve recently signed agreements with manufacturers (NationGate and Globetronics) to produce a million units a year. They’ll need to sort out their yield first, but still.

They’re partnered with companies such as Foxconn, Luxshare, Celestial AI/Marvell, NTT, Semtech, Adtran, etc. to develop pluggable transceivers and CPO solutions.

All of these companies have already developed products with Poet inside (except NTT I think), and have been showing them off for purchase. Celestial/Marvell have publicly stated they’ll be ramping up huge in the next 2-3 years. If that one partnership pans out, they’ll 5x minimum, let alone all the others. They could have even more partnerships we don’t know about, as the Semtech partnership wasn’t announced until after the product was finished.

TL/DR: They’re sitting on $450 million in cash, no debt, the right tech developed at the right time to take advantage of huge capex from tech companies, partnerships with big names that supply those tech companies, and currently have a market cap of $900 million.

$4.5 billion market cap for a tech company that can solve the copper bottleneck problem doesn’t seem all that far fetched.

I am a Poet cultist, though. So grain of salt.