I want your opinion. Some of you may even be smart. It’s not secret that WSB has a love for Kraken Robotics and defense stocks in general. I do as well but being newer I am still afraid of penny stocks and Krakens PE of 114 is daunting. Even their forward PE is still high at 83.
Somehow as a was browsing other smaller defense firms, I came across Coda Octopus Group. So here’s my small, uneducated, looking-for-advice take on CODA.
First things first about what I like about the company. They make money, and they have little debt/long term liabilities. Yahoo has their levered free cash at 3.12 mil and total debt/equity at just .7%. We also have a nice profit margin of 14%.
I see two identifying moats. First is they report that they’re the only company doing both 5D and 6D sonar imaging in real time. For those who like Kraken, you believe the battles of the future will rely heavily on underwater tech. This imagining falls in line with that. Even with conflict necessarily, the added focus on arctic trade routes and attention to Greenland should require advanced sonar imaging.
Next moat is Coda’s DAVD technology. DAVD stands for Diver Augmented Vision Display. Coda describes it simply as “End-to-end real-time diver management system (DAVD) for defense and commercial diving operations” (full description here: https://www.codaoctopus.com/dive/davd ) The idea is that the diver has real time augmented vision displays particularly useful in zero visibility dives. Clearly this could have massive military upside. They also offer this in tethered and untethered versions.
Currently Coda seems to do the most business with the UK, Denmark, and the USA. You may have heard the last two being in the news as of late… that being said the website does mention they technically do business around the globe albeit military sanctions can cut into sales.
As of writing this, CODA is trading at $12 up 3% from a down day yesterday. My biggest fear is the company has a market cap of just 131.742M and has been publicly traded now for over 20 years (granted with more stability over the past 10). I think there’s great potential here but is 12 too steep? Plenty of room to grow but does it have the legs to make a sizable move? I’m currently watching it and have no stake in it but I’m all ears. Upcoming earnings date is January 29th so ideally I’m in before that cause I do expect positive results.