Shawarma Capital

@SamuelH09880398 3 years old?

Pretty bearish article I found on snowpoint.com: snowpoint.com/post/merlin-au… Basically saying Merlin Labs $MRLN is just slightly better autopilot that already exists and has been moving goalposts for success. I own 2000 shares of $MRLN @ 7.53/share avg.

TY

@iamfabian <3 habibi

@ShawarmaCapital I fuckign love the name, habibi. You earned my follow 🤝🏻

New deep-dive is out. $IQEPF is the compound-semiconductor foundry sitting at the center of the AI photonics supply chain. Market still prices it like a distressed industrial. I entered under 1x revenue. Here is why I think that is wrong.

Fair. Three things you got that I didn't fully concede in the last reply. Plan Optik in Part 1. You're right. The line saying Plan Optik has a "proven LIDE process at scale" is wrong. LIDE is LPKF's proprietary process, not Plan Optik's. Part 2 walks them back to materials supplier, not equipment, but Part 1 stands as written and the Part 1 line is factually wrong. That's on me, not on you for catching it. JNTC. Also right. JNTC has their own in-house TGV process, builds their own equipment, and competes with the customers I'm modeling rather than buying from LPKF. They don't belong in the customer ramp. Coming out of the model. Absolics. Fair too. Philoptics is on Absolics's current TGV supplier list per recent reporting. LPKF is a future process-dualization possibility per the SKC capital-increase coverage, not a current relationship. I shouldn't be modeling Absolics as an LPKF customer in near-term scenarios. What I'm not conceding: Samsung EM is a real LPKF overlap per the Korean equipment supplier reporting (Philoptics, Chemtronics, Joongwoo M-Tech, and LPKF all named to the SE-M pilot line). Intel partnership since 2023 is on the public record. The four-tool architecture (TGV drilling, singulation, bonding, CPO waveguide) is in LPKF's own product family, not invented for the model. The framework holds. The customer list and the CPO ASP assumption don't, in the form they were in. On CPO ASP, also fair. There is no public CPO equipment pricing because the market doesn't exist yet. "Triangulated" oversells it. It's a modeled estimate. ty

Why the hell would I read part 2, it's paywalled lol. You know for a fact I'm not going to pay. And yes, I am critiquing ALL of the inputs. Where do you get any of these from? You vaguely list sources at the end but that is not how you're supposed to do citations lol "There are exactly two companies in the world with a proven LIDE process at scale: LPKF and a much smaller German competitor called Plan Optik. LPKF has dozens of installed tools globally and a multi-decade head start." I mean what are we even doing, this is a direct quote that compares the two And no, the main Philoptics overlap is with Absolics. Absolics is currently sole-sourcing from Philoptics, with plausible LPKF involvement in the future. And NO, JNTC is not a customer. They have their own TGV process. Post actual math about the modeling process with all the inputs directly cited and supported so we can talk again. Right now it's just literal LLM vomit with big numbers for the shock effect. How do you think you can predict CPO pricing power when there is *literally* zero data about it

Some potential high fliers I'm looking at that don't have as much X following: $LPK / $LPKFF - Glass substrates, an AI supply chain bottleneck, confirmed by $INTC in their latest earnings $SHMD - Same as LPKF, Except the risk here is higher and reward is too. Bad balance sheet, but potential customers are insane. $KRKNF - Basically a call option on Anduril unmanned submarines (they have almost complete monopoly on deep sea tech) $HIMS - Could see this doubling with good earnings and like 1 good headline, 35% short float. $NBIS - had a crazy run, but compute is just getting more scarce, and they are the top dog in the space in just a year, it's also my favorite company to hold atm. (risk reward is the best) Did I miss anything?

How insulting. Reads like a bratty child wrote a hate-post. You didn't read Part 2. Plan Optik isn't even a competitor in my framing. I said that in Part 2. They make glass wafers. They don't make equipment. Calling them a peer is like calling Corning a peer to ASML. Same with E&R. There's a full paragraph on them. They're a dual-source on TGV, sure, but in semicap dual-sourcing the primary supplier still gets 60 to 75 percent of the volume. LPKF has been working with Intel since 2023. E&R is the hedge. And E&R can't do CPO waveguide structuring, which is where the actual pricing power sits. Philoptics is the one you got me on. Real overlap on Samsung EM. I should have named them. On TAM, you're using LPKF's own ~€320M number. That figure is what they see today, on TGV equipment, with customers they've already qualified. My model is a 50-line ramp across all four tools (TGV plus singulation plus bonding plus CPO waveguide) and six customers including Samsung, Absolics, DNP, JNTC, and Rapidus. €13M of tool content per line, not €3.5M. CPO isn't in LPKF's number yet. That's the gap. On the €13M per line, fair. I should have cited the deck and the page rather than describing how I built it. The figure is LIDE system pricing from LPKF investor materials plus the other three tools weighted by relative complexity. Sourcing format, not math. The "no model" line is wrong. Part 2 has four scenarios, probability-weighted, with revenue, margin, multiple, price, and IRR per scenario, plus present value at two discount rates. You can argue the inputs. Saying there's no model just means you didn't open the post. Sources named in the body but not footnoted. So Philoptics and the sourcing format, you got. Plan Optik, E&R, the TAM scope, and the model, those you missed because you didn't read Part 2.

- His absurd PTs aren't grounded in anything, - He does not understand the competitor space (made apparent by using PlanOptik as a competitor, which it isn't, instead of actual competitors like E&R and Philoptics) - His TAM value is absurd with no backing, especially when LPKF itself estimates roughly 320M - Idk how he gets 3-5M as the ASP. I also don't know where he gets the 0.5M servicing costs from - I mean I literally don't know how he gets any of these values since no sources are cited. It's just LLM vomit, he's just saying things with no backing

@hanxea Meaning? Very ambiguous statement?

@ShawarmaCapital Anyone serious about this SPAC, shall look at their S1 file

$MRLN Matt George just told you what’s coming on stage at CNBC Converge. youtube.com/live/gEyhzbyRM… Watching the autonomy panel at 1:18:00, Singapore, this morning. Morgan Brennan asks Matt about retrofitting cockpits, are you working on other aircraft. He answers with the C-130J prime position, then this: “We’re also working on the KC-135 and a couple other aircraft that we haven’t announced yet. We now have to be much more careful about talking about those particularly as we’re now sort of a public company.” Then, thirty seconds later, the part nobody is going to clip: “How do you take autonomy out of some of these really high-end exquisite stealthy systems and start to put them in low-cost attritable systems. So more more to come on that for us… everything from the big C-130s all the way down to some smaller stuff but watch that space.” Two disclosures in one breath. The unnamed airframes are the obvious one. C-17 and P-8 are the cleanest USG fits, and C-17 also threads the Remah deal from yesterday since UAE flies eight of them. But the attritable line is the real tell. He said “watch that space” twice. That’s not aspirational language, that’s a CEO doing the legally cleared version of pre-announcing. The TAM implication is the whole game. Manned-large autonomy is a $5–10B pool where Merlin is the prime. Attritable autonomy at Replicator scale is a $50–100B pool, and Merlin walks in already certified after building for the hardest case first. Anduril, Shield AI, Kratos are all trying to climb up into safety-critical airspace from below. Merlin is climbing down from above. That direction is engineering. The other direction is invention. Part 5 covered the Remah channel. Part 6 might write itself. — Shawarma Capital

Entire $MRLN Parts 1-5 Series up on my Substack. If you’re interested in autonomous aviation, you should go give it a read. Very high potential. Anduril-Level Board. open.substack.com/pub/shawarmaca…

$MRLN signed an exclusive UAE teaming agreement with Remah International Group today. Sovereign partner. Active conflict zone. Autonomy stack moving into Middle East theater. Part 5 of the Merlin series is live on Shawarma Capital

$MRLN today: opened $12.28, touched $13.52, settled $12.73. Merlin Labs just locked an exclusive UAE teaming agreement with Remah International Group. First non-US geography commitment the thesis has ever had. Paid Part 5 is out. shawarmacapital.substack.com/p/the-uae-dea

@mkfilko @ShawarmaCapital how more people don’t follow Shawarma and more don’t talk about mrln is beyond me. this is an incredible opportunity

$MRLN

Youre the man!

@DaSteeringWheel HAHAHA

@ShawarmaCapital 😕 $MRLN

Fantastic.

Go and check @ShawarmaCapital DD out on $MRLN, this is probably a company that you won’t regret investing in. One of a kind. Highly asymmetric. And the best part is, you’re still early ;).

$MRLN signed its first international teaming agreement today. Remah International Group. Exclusive. UAE aviation. The thesis to date has been Pentagon-only. USSOCOM on the C-130J. AFMC on the KC-135. CRADA with USAF. GE and Northrop on engineering. All US defense. RIG reframes it. They're the UAE gatekeeper for Northrop Grumman and SAAB. Thirty years servicing UAE Armed Forces. Merlin is getting signed in at that tier, not as a startup pilot. Timing is the tell. Mark Brunner started as CRO on April 13. This hit nine days later. Either he walked into a teed-up deal or accelerated existing pipeline. Both read as execution speed. The framework is not a contract. OPT signed the same RIG wrapper in late 2024 and it took quarters to convert. Don't mark revenue to the announcement. Wait for the 8-K with a dollar value or a named platform. What this actually is: the first non-US channel on the board, announced two weeks into a new CRO's tenure, inside a catalyst window that already included the Q1 13F deadline, the first post-merger 10-Q, S-1 resale registration, and the September lockup.