Aurora Innovation NASDAQ:AUR has been getting plenty of love from investors in recent months, with stock up 84% in the last six months. The Pittsburgh-based self-driving vehicle tech company and developer of autonomous driving solution Aurora Driver, just announced it was releasing an open source, large scale multi-sensor dataset.
In this article we run Aurora Innovation stock through the AI-driven analytics at BridgeWise, to see how Aurora stacks up against its peers. Is it still worth buying into, or is the stock looking a little ‘frothy’ now?
The AI uses a wide range of factors to identify close peers of Aurora’s including the likes of Cintas NASDAQ:CTAS, Copart NASDAQ:CPRT and Republic NYSE:RSG. This also helps it to establish a ‘peers average’ which can provide us with a more informed and realistic sector average than simply high level sector and market cap data.
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What we can see immediately from this analysis is despite the recent good performance from the stock, Aurora is still off the mark with its balance sheet, rated a 49/100. Its last income statement looks superior to its peers, however. Equity and cash / equivalents are immediately flagged up as potential areas of concern for Aurora Innovation going forward.
Senior management at Aurora are going to need to get a better handle on cash management if the company is going to continue to deliver returns like it has done over the last six months. The tech sector, especially next generation automotive tech, can be notoriously fickle and one year’s darling with investors can end up falling off a cliff the next.
But here’s the good news…
Revenue efficiency at Aurora is another story, however. The company seems to be balancing strong revenue efficiency and EBITDA along with an overall impressive positive income statement. Aurora Innovation’s financials reveal an interesting trend for their revenue efficiency, which our analysis indicates could have a more positive impact, and potentially more than balance out some of the cash management issues flagged previously.
Overall revenue efficiency BridgeWise scores at 99/100, which is a sector beater. By comparison Cintas scores 63/100 and Copart 66/100. Going further some our list, a company like Tetra Tech NASDAQ:TTEK is only scoring 44/100.
Cash flow at Aurora Innovation also looks respectable, although capital expenditure growth is sub-par and will be one for analysts to keep an eye on going forward.
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BridgeWise provides Aurora with an overall rating of Hold.
All that said, this sector remains a very hot one at the moment, and it is entirely possible further speculative buying will drive this share price higher. That does not mean such buying is justified, however!
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