Quantum computing stock price also discounted on Double Eleven

It's double 11 again, but it's not just the goods that are on sale, it's also the stock price of quantum computing companies.

Uncle Box found that in the last three months, quantum computing company D-Wave fell from a high of $13.23 all the way to a low of $2.33, a drop of 82%, and the total market value shrunk from $1.46 billion to $260 million. Another company, Rigetti, is even worse, down 83% in the last three months; if you look over a longer period of time, Rigetti's share price high was $12.75 on November 18, 2021, and a year later, on November 10, 2022, the share price was only $0.981, shrinking its total market cap from $1.5 billion to $100 million in one year. Another company, IonQ, has fallen about 50% in the last three months and still has a market cap of over $1 billion, but keep in mind that IonQ's market cap topped $7 billion a year ago.

Why does this happen? Let's analyze one by one. For D-Wave, Photon Box has analyzed in the article "Two years, IBM quantum computing invention patents increased by 769, Tencent increased by 45.5 times", according to the IPRdaily global quantum computing technology invention patent list, the company also ranked first in the list in 2019, the number of patents is 1.4 times of IBM. However, it was overtaken by IBM in the second year, and this year it was left far behind by Google, which was second.

At the time, we analyzed that investors may have little confidence in D-Wave's quantum annealing technology. We knew that the quantum annealing system is a dedicated quantum computer and therefore may have limited prospects compared to a general purpose quantum computer based on gates. This is the main reason for D-Wave's decision to develop a gate-model quantum computer. The slow patent growth in recent years may also be related to the fact that they are spreading their resources to the gate system. the development progress of D-Wave's gate system may affect the future stock price trend.

Even if we just look at quantum annealing, D-Wave didn't have any new products this year, only showing a prototype of a 7000 quantum bit annealer, which is actually only 500 quantum bits.

Coming back to Rigetti, the recent share price plunge is directly related to company founder Chad Rigetti stepping down as CEO, and as a company that bears his name, Chad Rigetti's importance cannot be overstated. According to Chad, stepping down as CEO is to focus on technology - after all, he comes from a technical background. Prior to founding Rigetti Computing, Chad spent nearly three years as a researcher in IBM's quantum computing group. By 2013, he had realized that quantum computing held the promise of commercialization and decided to leave IBM and start his own business.

Rigetti is a good company in general, with its own chip factory, its own programming language and cloud platform, but it just loves to "launch satellites".

In September 2018, Rigetti Computing announced plans to build a 128-quantum-bit computer based on a new chip architecture within the next 12 months. Four years later, that goal has not yet been reached. Last year, Rigetti released 40- and 80-quantum-bit chips, which is always a new progress.

But there is actually more than one such thing, for example, 2021 said to launch 1000 and 4000 quantum bit chips in 2024 and 2026 respectively, by May this year, and then postponed a year back.

Now, according to their latest roadmap, they will launch an 84-quantum-bit chip in early 2023, followed by a 336-quantum-bit processor, Lyra, later in 2023, and I wonder if Rigetti will be able to keep its promise this time.

As for IonQ, there was a black swan event in May this year, which was detailed in "Quantum computing company IonQ listed by short-sellers as "17 sins"" by Photon Box, when the famous short-seller Scorpion Capital said it was shorting IonQ's stock. But IonQ has an advantage over the previous two companies, having launched a new system this year, IonQ Aria, which achieves a record 20 algorithmic quantum bits.

This shows that you have to come up with the real thing for the market to buy it.

Finally, let's make a hypothetical. If IBM's quantum computing division were to go public as a standalone company, would it fall so much? How much would the market capitalization be? You can leave your opinion in the comment section.