Himax Technologies Inc. - HIMX

Quick Take

The AI animal spirits have firmly taken hold of the shares of HIMX over this past week. News reports appear to indicate that they will be an exclusive supplier to chip manufacturing giant Taiwan Semiconductor’s (TSM) photonics platform that will eventually be making the next generation of Nvidia (NVDA) GPU’s. If you were a small also-ran technology outfit like HIMX, you just couldn’t hope to be even tangentially connected to a couple of hotter companies. Whether or not this relationship turns out to be exactly what the report suggests, I wanted to point out that HIMX has traveled down this road before, and not just once.

First there was Google Glass

Anyone out there remember Google Glass? Those terminator-robot-looking things you wore like glasses that had a built-in heads-up-microdisplay (HUD) that beamed what you were looking at right onto your eyeball? These glasses would allow anyone wearing them from auto mechanics to brain surgeons the ability to quickly scan instruction manuals and consult expert advice in the blink of an eye and all without having to take their eyes off what they were working on. The possibilities just seemed endless.

Here’s GOOG founder Sergey Brin showing them off.

Enabling that technology? Yeah, that was, and still is, a HIMX product.

At the time, that particular relationship was hyped into the stratosphere that GOOG was so confident in HIMX and their microdisplays that they took a 6.2% investment in the company. This investment would have been close to $100M, a sum that would have been a decent bet even for a company the size of GOOG. Things didn’t quite turn out the way the bulls had hoped, as GOOG had really only taken a 6.2% stake in a tiny HIMX subsidiary called Himax Display, making GOOG’s real investment basically immaterial.