General
March 21, 2021
8 minutes read

Newly-Public Lidar Company Luminar Heads For China’s Auto Market

Luminar Technologies, a company making lidar sensors for autonomous vehicles that went public through a much-talked-about SPAC merger a few…

SAIC's R vehicle with the Iris lidar on its roofline.

Luminar Technologies, a company making lidar sensors for autonomous vehicles that went public through a much-talked-about SPAC merger a few months ago, has added another major lidar supply deal to its package of contracts, this time with a Chinese automaker that’s known to be the biggest in the country by the name SAIC Motor.

Luminar has entered into a strategic partnership with SAIC Motor that’ll see it supply lidar hardware and the accompanying autonomous driving software for a new line of SAIC electric vehicles dubbed R. The contract will kick off next year, 2022, and it’s noted that targets exist for Luminar to supply lidars for SAIC’s entire vehicle lineup needing it.

With its partnership with SAIC, Luminar will open its first office in China in Shanghai, the same city where SAIC is based. From there, the Chinese automaker will provide local support for Luminar as it gets into a foreign market it hasn’t been into before.

For the new R brand electric car unveiled by SAIC, it’ll make use of Luminar’s flat and compact lidar named Iris, which’s pictured on the vehicle concept below. It’s the same lidar that Luminar is supplying to another of its main automaking partners, Volvo.

Luminar’s Iris lidar.

SAIC’s R vehicle with the Iris on its roofline.

Iris on a Volvo concept car

With its partnership with Luminar, SAIC has noted its hopes of delivering the first autonomous production vehicles in China. For that, it’s very notable that the Chinese automaking giant traveled far abroad to the US to seek a lidar-making partner rather than get one locally. This speaks to Luminar having considerable expertise and prowess in its area.

Contracts like the one it just got with SAIC Motor present a lucrative revenue source for Luminar. The company which went public in December 2020 has said it expects to generate a minuscule $25 million-$30 million in revenue this year but as high as $800 million by 2025 to be driven by contracts with global automakers.

Now along with SAIC, Luminar also has supply deals with others including Swedish carmaker Volvo, Germany’s Daimler Truck AG, and Intel’s Mobileye. Together, its signed supply deals represent over $1 billion in potential revenue, Luminar recently noted.

Being a 400-person company founded in 2012 and with major supply deals to its name, Luminar has obviously fared very well in the world of lidar companies. To back that up, investors are very confident in the company that it has a current market value of $10 billion, over 700x its 2020 revenues of $14 million.