Smarthome Device Public Companies

I'm a few weeks into smartening up my home, and i could see how this trend will not stop. Aside from the back-end and throughput, devices will drive the market. I'd love to hear from the veterans here which companies are really making a difference in the space, aside from the tech giants and massive companies. Who are the small public players that have great business models?

One that I like right now is Arlo: Small enough for tiny investors like me, who want to put their money into fields that I enjoy. There must be some others, yes?

Small and public? Those don't usually go together. You don't see many small firms traded on the NYSE. I don't know of any publicly traded small companies that work in Home Automation. Companies like Hubitat, Zooz, Inovelli, Aeotec, RGBGenie...they're all private companies. They only ones you're going to see are things like GE, Samsung, etc. And their Home Automation divisions probably account for a fraction of a percent of their total business.

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there are lots of small cap companies out there.

arlo is small cap - 342.6Million market cap

compared to say GE - $105.06Billion

and then there are lots of companies traded off NYSE that you don't hear about in stock news, but perhaps are building components or devices. these are the ones that might make a big splash over the next few years. there's so much innovation out there, and so many great products (i picked up a bunch of zooz switches yesterday and an aeotec doorbell). nothing is to stop someone like aeotec from have a public stock. i'd buy them!

Okay...let me put it another way....I don't know of any Home Automation company that is publicly traded that you wouldn't have already heard about (i.e. Samsung, GE, Amazon, Google, etc).

I didn't say there was. I simply don't know of any that do. That was your question. Not whether I thought it right that they have public stock. If you don't like the answer I gave fine but don't blame me for trying to answer it for you. Jeez.

@Ryan780,

I wasn't taking an argumentative position with you, just sharing my thoughts. I wasn't inferring you were taking a moral position. My apologies if it came off that way.

Cheers!

Control4 is a publicly traded HA company on NASDAQ (CTRL)

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how is there repubtation @mark1?

I’m curious where you got that number. Isn’t Arlo owned by netgear? According to yahoo, their market cap is more than double the number you referenced.

But whether they’re worth $300 million, $800 million or $100 billion, how does that impact your decision as a tiny investor to buy their stock?

Edit: actually I see now that netgear spun off Arlo into its own company in 2018, didn’t realize that.

@marktheknife, so my interest in the small cap companies is basically the "cost of entry." I'm not a wealthy man in the financial sense, however i'm not poor either. I don't have interest in investing in companies like Amazon, where there is no great growth opportunity. I like investing in the up and coming companies that are making waves in the fields that i enjoy.

In this case, i am loving home automation, and see it following the path that smartphones took ten years ago. A company like ARLO (or pehaphs CTRL4) may find exponential growth as more and more people buy in to smarthomes.

I also can't stand "cloud" and "SaaS" as business models, so i really want to put my money in companies that will be successful without depending on loading out lives into the cloud, or charging us a mandatory monthly service the rest of our lives. :slight_smile:

C4 is pricey when compared to a DIY solution - but they are a well established HA company. You have to buy C4 products from an authorized dealer/integrator.