IonQ announced their Q4 and full year 2023 financial results showing strong growth from the previous year. For Q4’2023 they recorded revenue of $6.1 million versus $6.1 million in Q3’2023 and $3.8 million in Q4’2022. For the full year of 2023 they achieved revenue of $22 million almost double the full year 2022 amount of $11.1 million. The 2023 revenues were at the high end of the forecast they made during their Q3 report last November.
However, the company’s Net Loss also increased from the previous year. The Q4’2023 Net Loss was $41.9 million versus $18.6 in Q4’2022 and for the full year the Net Loss in 2023 was $157.7 million versus $48.5 million in 2022. The Adjusted EBITDA loss for 2023 was $77.7 million compared with $48.6 million in 2022. During 2023, the company more than doubled its investments in R&D and Sales & Marketing and also incurred significant increases in the General and Administrative, and Stock-based Compensation categories.
Bookings came in at $6.1 million for Q4’2023 and $65.1 million for the full year of 2023. The full year number exceeded the company’s previous forecast of $60-$63 million which they had made in November. The company pointed out that both their revenue and bookings may be “lumpy” due to the early state of their business. For example, the bookings amount for Q3’2023 was $26.3 million due to a large contract award from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The company remains in an excellent cash position ending the year with $455.9 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. At year-end 2022, they had $537.8 million.
The company also provided their current financial outlook for 2024. They are forecasting Q1’2024 revenue between $6.5 and $7.5 million with a full year 2024 estimate between $37 and $41 million. They anticipate 2024 bookings to come in between $70 and $90 million and an Adjusted EBITDA loss for the year at $110.5 million.
The company also made some additional technical and personnel announcements during their earnings call. They announced a further improvement in their #AQ performance metric achieving #AQ36 from the #AQ35 level they had just announced a month ago. They also announced that they’ve developed and are testing a new photonic integrated circuit (PIC). This type of components will be very important for their future plans to miniaturize and reduce the production cost of their systems. They also reiterated the progress made in testing transducer technology for converting ion based qubits to photons for transmission over a fiber optic cable. This is a key technology that will enable the networking multiple processors together to create a much larger quantum computing system. During the company’s conference call, they hinted at some new techniques they are exploring to reduce the system gate delays by several orders of magnitude. They will be converting to use barium based qubits for their future Tempo system with an #AQ64 performance level. But they also mentioned in the call they they are exploring the use of electromagnetic techniques for controlling the gates. That technique as well as the use of networking via photonic connections would be intended for use in future generations of systems after Tempo.
The company announced two new members of its Board of Directors. These include Robert Cardillo, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Bill Scannell, President of Global Sales and Customer Operations at Dell Technologies. Finally, the company announced that Dr. Jungsang Kim, a co-founder and former CTO of the company, will be leaving active employment at the company to return to his academic activities as a professor at Duke University. The company has hired a substantial technical team and technical management over the past several years that is now responsible for all of the company’s the technical work, but Dr. Kim will still be supporting the company as a technical advisor.
For details on IonQ’s financial results and overall company progress, you can access their press release here, listen to a recording of the Q4 result webcast here, view an Investor Update presentation here, and/or download their 10K and 8K SEC filings here and here.
February 28, 2024
