planet lab Shares have fallen sharply in recent months as investors bet on the company’s satellite data offering.
The stock has soared since early September and is up more than 100% in the past three months, making it one of the best-performing companies in CNBC’s review of San Francisco-based companies. The company’s stock has soared more than 215% this year, building on last year’s more than 60% rise.
“Investors are starting to realize the potential of our business,” Ashley Johnson, the company’s president and chief financial officer, told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
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All week, Sullivan has been interviewing leaders in San Francisco’s top-performing stocks. The interview can be viewed on the Power Lunch homepage.
Johnson said Planet Labs uses hundreds of satellites to record everything happening on Earth. From there, the company uses artificial intelligence to help its customer base in governments and large corporations make decisions.
He said the industry has historically focused more on “point-and-click” data that captures a location at a specific moment in time. But Johnson said Planet Labs is “shifting the paradigm” by using large amounts of data to measure things like surface temperature that the human eye can’t track.
Planet Labs uses machines to “look at very wide-ranging correlations and derive really important decision-making capabilities from that,” Johnson said. “This is very different from, ‘Can I use this image of me occupying that parking lot to count how many cars are in this parking lot?'”
Johnson noted that each satellite costs about $300,000 to build and launch, but she said that price has been lowered by Silicon Valley innovation. In fact, the cumulative cost of Planet Labs’ more than 600 satellites is lower than the cost of traditional industry satellites a decade ago, she said.
Johnson said Planet Labs can sell the same data to multiple customers, increasing profit margins. He said the company is seeing increased interest from governments looking for an edge amid geopolitical uncertainty.
Indeed, the stock hit a tough patch earlier this year, dropping more than 20% in both February and March.
However, the majority of analysts rate the stock a buy, according to LSEG. Wall Street also expects the stock to rise further, with its average price target suggesting an additional 5% upside.
