LWLG Earnings: The Stock Got Hit for Telling the Truth

Lightwave Logic $LWLG reported earnings Tuesday night & moved volume production from the back half of 2027 to 2028. The stock got taken to the woodshed, from $4.39 at the close to around $3.50 Wednesday morning. That’s what the tape does with a pushed date. But read the call before you pile on, because management did something this industry rarely does. They said the quiet part out loud.

LWLG earnings said the quiet part out loud

The polymer didn’t slip. The supply chain did. CEO Yves LeMaitre told investors that the foundries making $LWLG chips are busy feeding their own silicon photonics customers first, so a new material waits in line. One partner hit process problems & came up short on usable chips. No spin, no “on track.” Just a new date & the reason for it.

He’s far from alone. Coherent $COHR said last week that it doubled its indium phosphide output & still can’t make enough lasers for its own products. Lumentum $LITE has told investors its pump lasers are effectively sold out. Applied Optoelectronics $AAOI said in August that demand would outrun its capacity through mid-2027. Big or small, it’s the same story at every stop: too many orders & not enough parts.

So this isn’t a knock on $LWLG, or on anybody else in the AI complex. These delays come from demand running ahead of supply, and that’s a far better problem than the other kind. The quarter had real progress in it too. Foxconn showed a transceiver built on the $LWLG polymer at Hon Hai Tech Day, & five Fortune Global 500 customers sit at Stage 3 of the design-win process. Management told the truth about the date & took the hit up front. Give them credit for that.

We’ve read the chatter comparing LWLG & POET. They’re completely different animals

We get why people line them up. Two small photonics names, neither with real revenue yet, both cut down from highs above $18 in the last year. That’s about where the overlap ends. One note before the comparison: POET Technologies POET Technologies (POET) pays us & the disclosure’s at the bottom, so check our math.

The tech. $LWLG makes a material. Its electro-optic polymer gets layered onto a silicon photonics chip so the modulator, the part that turns electricity into pulses of light, runs faster on less power. Think ingredient. Somebody else’s foundry has to bake it in. $POET builds the platform the parts sit on. Its Optical Interposer puts lasers, modulators & detectors onto a single chip at wafer scale, and the company sells the finished optical engines & light sources. Think kitchen. You could picture both in the same building someday.

The cash. $LWLG had $87.8 million on Sept. 30 & no debt. Its CFO says that funds the plan “into 2028.” Production is slated for 2028 too, so the cash date & the ship date share a year, with no margin for error. $POET had $796.3 million on June 30, with no bonds or converts, and its Q3 figure lands Monday. At the burn & capex in its September deck, that’s more than six years. The $POET pile earned $4.3 million of interest & other income in Q2 alone, which is close to the $5.2 million $LWLG burned running its whole business last quarter. A supply chain delay is a bad quarter for $POET. For $LWLG it’s a financing question.

The value. Take each share price & back out net cash. At $3.50, $LWLG is about 54 cents of cash & $2.96 of business, call it $456 million. At $5.07, $POET is about $4.40 of cash & 67 cents of business, call it $116 million. Last reported quarterly revenue was $38,000 for $LWLG & $569,925 for $POET. So the market pays nearly four times more for the company with one shot at its date than for the company with six years of them. Only one of these stocks got marked down to its cash. We think the tape has that backwards.

None of this makes $POET a sure thing, & we won’t tell you it is. Cash buys time. It doesn’t buy customers. The $50 million Lumilens order still has to become shipped product & booked sales, and deliveries are the whole game from here. $AAOI wrote that script. The growth showed up after the shipments did.

What we’re watching

December comes first. $LWLG expects wafers from its third foundry partner that month. If they land on time, the 2028 date holds. If they slip, the cash date & the ship date stop sharing a year.

Monday is the $POET turn. Q3 results hit at 7:00 a.m. ET & the cash figure updates. We’ll rerun this math on the new numbers.