Palantir IPO: Exercise extreme caution, may not be as smooth sailing as other recent tech IPOs

• We believe that Palantir might continue to make winning bids for government contracts and maintain/increase its revenue share. However, future growth and share price will be driven by Palantir’s ability to acquire and grow large corporate customers, and not govt. contracts.
• Palantir has not seen a single year of profits since inception 17 years ago. It is not clear to us how this situation will change in the coming year.
• We firmly believe that their data mining software is industry leading. But we’re not convinced that this alone is enough for widespread corporate consumption.
• Palantir has the first-mover advantage to offer specialised, customer-specific, use-case data analytics software. It needs to become price competitive to capture market share. 

Given the negative public image and governance concerns, we don’t think Palantir would repeat the success of a Snowflake or Unity. Listing gains maybe limited, long term investors may want to back the company.

The success of Foundry- Palantir’s enterprise SaaS platform will be the primary driver of its growth. However, in the near term, it will be out shadowed by its negative public perception and unethical use of private data. The stock is likely to underperform, atleast compared to more straight forward SaaS companies. Download the report for an in-depth analysis of this tech giant.