LibCapital

The 2nd Robot Marathon has officially begun in Beijing. This year feels different. 1. Around 40% of teams are running fully autonomous, no remote control. 2. Top robots are already hitting ~10s per 100 meter, getting surprisingly close to human sprint limits. 3. You can also see much better safety design upfront. Way more structured than last year’s chaos. 4. Still, failures happen. Marathon distance pushes motors, structure, and control to the limit. What works in short demos breaks down over longer runs. Overall, a big step forward, but also a reminder that real-world robotics is still far from the polished demo videos you get fed from companies.

Photonics is a bit confusing, hopefully this simplified summary helps. I have positions in $TSEM, $SOI, $ALMU, $LPKF

Now look at valuation context: $LITE - multi bn market cap $COHR - multi bn $FN - multi bn $SOITEC - multi bn $AXTI - multi bn All exposed to optical connectivity in different ways. IQE? £160m market cap. Yet it sits at a foundational upstream layer of the same ecosystem.

If you think you’ve “missed” $IQE after the recent move, zoom out. c$650m mcap, ~c5x sales - still trading at a steep discount to peers. That was always the thesis: it was so cheap that even a 2x rerate still leaves upside.

$IQE is one of two names on its layer. IQE FY25 $130M rev / $335M mcap - 2.6x sales $VPEC $114M (Q3'25 run-rate) / $1.4B mcap - 12.3x Landmark FY25 $69M rev / $4B mcap - 58x For the same photonics exposure, IQE stands out.

Didn’t I tell you all it’s possible retail can frontrun institutions anon?? -> Point72 is aggressively buying up $IQE 2 months later at ATHs... After my latent InP reactor capacity + $LITE supplier thesis post. -> Apollo literally bought out NSG, the $TSM COUPE glass provider I identified. -> And I've identified many others like $SIVE, the $MRVL / $JBL supplier to Riber the unknown quantum supplier to $MSFT (with the help of a friend) recently. I happen to like democratizing information discovery/synthesis to retail investors at the very beginning… Instead of selling analysis to institutions or behind $20000+ paywalls. Stocks are genuinely positive sum where retail can get the lead for the first time.

Was the first to talk about $AXTI in relation to photonics BOM/supply chains: $IQE is very interesting too as one of the only Western suppliers. Basically if you look at photonics flow on $GOOGL TPU/hyperscaler ASICs kinda looks like this (very likely, but undisclosed): Optical Transceivers (highest BOM): Lumentum/Cloud Light: ~ Vital / $AXTI-> $AXTI/Sumitomo/JX -> $IQE (Epi-Wafers) -> $LITE / Cloud Light -> $FN (Contract Manufacturing) -> $GOOGL TPU Merhcant optical supply chain: ~ Vital / $AXTI -> $AXTI / Sumitomo / JX -> → $LITE / $AVGO / $COHR (EML) + $MRVL / $MTSI / Semtech -> Innolight/Eoptolink -> $GOOGL So if you want moonshot-type photonics BOM / price-hikes stocks deeper upstream in the photonics BOM: $AXTI, $IQE and your way to go. $AXTI had terrible fundamentals before but the recent Northland fundraising round cemented its run. $IQE has terrible fundamentals now (Net debt £23.5 million) but is probably one of the most critical parts of the supply chain. If they manage to sell their Taiwan operations, wouldn't be surprised if it went up quite a bit just from their inp business. There's £18m convertible notes (which is basically nothing), then there's 120 to 154m new shares (~12% to 15%), which is also kinda nothing relative to current size. On the other hand, others $LITE and Innolight are probably more established. TLDR: $IQE -> seems critical to Western supply chains, $130MC. Net debt, if they sell Taiwan business -> strong re-rating or they might just dilute you anyway. But if the Taiwan business fails to be sold, probably expect to be diluted to oblivion like Wolfspeed. So huge, huge, risk ad do you own research into risks. But $AXTI and $IQE might are personally interesting to me (I do own $IQE).