POET Stock at $5.38: 98 Cents a Share for the Business

 $POET is $5.38 as we write this. Five months ago a single institution wrote a $400 million check for POET stock at $21 a share, a premium to market, the day after the stock printed its all-time high at $20.81. Today the whole company goes for $931 million, and $796.3 million of that was sitting in cash and short-term investments on June 30. Read that twice. Eighty-five cents of every dollar you pay for POET Technologies $POET is a bank deposit or a Canadian bank GIC. The other fifteen cents buys everything else: the Optical Interposer, the patents, the people, the Lumilens deal, the whole business. We think that’s crazy. We’re also paid by POET, so don’t take our word for it. Take the arithmetic. It’s five lines long and every input comes out of the filing.

The POET net cash per share formula

Enterprise value is the tool. The inputs come from POET’s condensed interim financial statements for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. No models, no estimates, just a balance sheet and a share price.

1. Market cap = share price × basic shares outstanding. $5.38 × 173,035,169 = $931 million.

2. Net cash = cash and short-term investments minus total liabilities. $796.3 million minus $34.3 million = $762.0 million.

3. Net cash per share = net cash divided by basic shares. $762.0 million divided by 173.0 million = $4.40.

4. Enterprise value = market cap minus net cash. $931 million minus $762 million = $169 million. That’s the sticker price the market has hung on everything POET owns that isn’t cash.

5. What you pay for the business per share = share price minus net cash per share. $5.38 minus $4.40 = $0.98.

What 98 cents buys you

Here’s the part we can’t get past. Ninety-eight cents a share, $169 million all in, is the market’s price for a patented Optical Interposer platform with 49 patents and 37 applications behind it, per POET’s September deck. A team of 150-plus people in six countries. The Malaysia capacity build. A $50 million initial purchase order inside a supply agreement that runs up to $500 million with Lumilens, a customer that raised $700 million while it was still in stealth. Named engagements with Mitsubishi and Lessengers. Six straight quarters of sequential revenue growth. Argue the business is worth more than that or less, fine. What you can’t argue with is the number. The market has it at $169 million. In May it had the stock at $20.81. Same patents. Same customer. More cash now than then.

The $34 million that isn’t scary

We subtracted every liability on the books, and that's harsher than it needs to be. Payables and payroll: $4.4 million. A $5.8 million interest-free note owed to a former partner for buying out its stake in a Chinese subsidiary, paid down through 2029. Leases, $2.0 million. A $45,000 contract liability. And $22.0 million labeled "derivative warrant liability," which isn't a bill at all. It's a Black-Scholes mark on about 2.4 million warrants that happen to be booked as a liability. Exercising them never costs POET a dollar; at most, shares get issued. Strip it and net cash is $784 million, $4.53 a share, and the enterprise value drops to $147 million. We ran the harsh version because we'd rather get yelled at for being conservative.

No bank debt. No bonds. No preferred stock ahead of the common. The filing says it plainly: no credit facilities. Say what you want about the dilution that got POET here, and plenty of people have, but the result is one small note and a pile of cash.

The warrants: the monster under the bed is mostly out of the money

POET has 78.7 million warrants outstanding, and that number scares people until you sort it by strike.

At $5.38, only 9.4 million are in the money, with strikes between $1.09 and $5.00. Exercise every one and POET collects $31.9 million. Then comes a 27.4 million block struck between $5.94 and $7.12, the paper from the 2024 and 2025 private placements. Those are the ones that matter for the tape. Every time POET stock pushes back through $6 and $7, that’s a wall of holders who can exercise and sell. Supply, not demand.

Above that sit 22.9 million warrants at $8.25 issued to the customer behind the $500 million supply agreement. Only 2.3 million have vested. The rest vest as the customer hits payment milestones, so they only become real if the orders become real. Last, 19.0 million warrants at $26.25 from the May financing. Different zip code. Exercise every warrant on the books and POET would take in another $901 million, but that’s a world where the stock is north of $26.25, not this one.

Add 5.4 million options at a $2.10 average strike and about 7 million RSUs, run the treasury math at $5.38, and you get 194.8 million diluted shares, $805 million of net cash and $4.13 a share. Enterprise value on that basis is $243 million, or $1.25 a share for the business. Harsher again. Still mostly cash.

Haircut the June number

The third quarter ended September 30 and POET hasn’t reported it yet. The print lands Monday, November 16 at 7:00 a.m. ET, and POET announced the date a month early. We like that. Operating cash burn was $12.2 million in Q2. The September deck projects around $15 million a quarter of burn and about $60 million of capital spending for 2026, and only $5.4 million of that capex had gone out the door by June 30, so the back half is the heavy half. Interest claws some back; other income, mostly interest on the cash pile, was $4.3 million in Q2 alone.

Knock $50 million off for a quarter of burn and capex. Net cash goes to $712 million, $4.12 a share, and the enterprise value rises to $219 million. That still leaves 76 cents of every dollar of market cap in cash. Two things we left out on purpose: the $30 million POET lent to an unnamed borrower at 6% interest, and a $3 million preferred-stock stake in Lessengers. Both sit on the balance sheet. Neither is cash.

The peer check: $COHR, $LITE and $LWLG

Now run the same five lines on the names POET gets lumped in with and you will see exactly what we see. Prices are Friday’s close, October 16, except Lightwave Logic at its October 13 close. Balance sheets are the latest filed.

Coherent $COHR: $232.90 a share, 197 million shares, a $45.9 billion market cap. Cash and short-term investments about $2.0 billion, debt $3.2 billion. Net debt, not net cash. Cash covers 4 cents of every dollar of market cap, and you pay $239 a share of business for a $233 stock because you inherit the debt. Fair enough, Coherent did $7 billion of revenue last fiscal year.

Lumentum $LITE: $824.13 a share, about 89 million shares, a $73 billion market cap. Cash and short-term investments $2.7 billion, against $1.6 billion of convertible notes and $2 billion of convertible preferred that sits ahead of the common. Cash covers 4 cents on the dollar and the business is 101% of the price. Also fair. Lumentum did about $3 billion of revenue in fiscal 2026 and says it’s booked through early 2029.

Lightwave Logic $LWLG is the real comp. Pre-revenue photonics, $32,751 of sales in Q2, $96 million of cash and marketable securities, no debt, 154 million shares. At $4.30 that’s a $664 million market cap and a $568 million enterprise value. Cash covers 14 cents of every dollar. The market pays $3.68 of a $4.30 stock for an electro-optic polymer story targeting a production ramp in 2027.

Line them up by what the market pays for the business as a share of the stock price: Coherent 103%, Lumentum 101%, Lightwave Logic 86%, POET 18%. Or by enterprise value against cash: Coherent and Lumentum trade at more than 20 times their cash, Lightwave Logic at 6 times, POET at 0.2 times. One of these is not like the others. Lightwave Logic’s business, with $62,000 of first-half revenue and $96 million in the bank, carries an enterprise value three and a half times POET’s. POET booked 17 times Lightwave’s revenue in Q2 and holds eight times the cash. You can likely guess where we land on that. You get to decide for yourself.

What this is, and what it isn’t

This is arithmetic, not a valuation. We don’t publish price targets on $POET, and net cash per share is not a floor. Cash-rich companies trade below their cash all the time when the market decides the cash is going to get burned. So $4.40 is a reference line. It tells you how much of the POET stock price is backed by something you can count and how much is backed by a story about photonics, hyperscalers and the ramp. At $7.46 in late August, cash covered 62% of the market cap. At $6.41 on October 12, 72%. At $5.38, 85%. The story got cheaper. The cash didn’t move. Institutions bought into this balance sheet at higher prices than today’s, which is its own data point.

What we’re watching

One: the September 30 cash balance on November 16. If it lands near $750 million, burn and capex ran at the deck’s pace and this formula barely moves. If it lands well below that, we’ll want to know what the money bought.

Two: the share count in the Q3 filing. At $5.38, nobody holding a $5.94 strike or higher is exercising, so warrant dilution is parked until the stock reclaims those levels. If the count moves, it’s RSUs and options, not warrants.

Three: whether the first conference call changes the conversation. POET said quarterly calls start with the full-year results on March 1, 2027. A management team taking live questions about $796 million will be asked what it’s for. We’d like to hear the answer too.

Subscribe to StockAlpha.ai and we’ll re-run this formula the morning of November 16 with the September 30 balance sheet.