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Shares in Mobileye Global tumbled by more than a quarter in pre-market trading on Thursday after one of the world’s biggest makers of autonomous driving technology warned that its customers had scaled back orders.
The group, which was spun off from chipmaker Intel and listed on the Nasdaq in 2022, said that an excess of inventory had prompted carmakers to cut orders for the first quarter.
As a result, revenues for this year would be between $1.83bn and $1.96bn. That is below analyst estimates of $2.58bn, according to LSEG data. For the first quarter, revenues would be “significantly below” the same period last year.
Mobileye, which was founded in Israel in 1999 and counts the likes of Porsche and Volkswagen as customers, first focused on producing “collision-avoidance” technology, but has subsequently expanded to enabling “fully autonomous driving”.
Shares in the company, which has a market capitalisation of $32bn, were down 27 per cent in pre-market trading.
Its customers were saddled with surplus inventory because they had stockpiled during the supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the company said.
“As supply chain concerns have eased, we expect that our customers will use the vast majority of this excess inventory in the first quarter of the year,” Mobileye said, adding that it expected the inventory picture to normalise by the end of the year.
Its operating loss for the year was expected to balloon to between $378mn and $468mn, the company said, up from an estimated loss of between $33mn and $39mn in 2023.
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