Foresight Autonomous Holdings Ltd.'s (TASE: FRST) share, which has performed very well this year, plunged 6.6% on Tuesday and 16.8% yesterday, bringing its fall to over 40% so far this month, before correcting 9.9% in trading today, as of web posting. The share price has lost 60% from its peak of three months ago.
The recent drop in the share price brought the company's market cap down to NIS 315 million, compared with its mid-May peak of over NIS 700 million, at which point the share had given investors a phenomenal return of nearly 400% this year. The subsequent slide has eliminated most of those gains.
Foresight is in the red-hot sector of preventing traffic accidents and developing software solutions for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving apps. The company has been benefiting from the big hype in the sector in recent months, following Intel's acquisition of Mobileye for more than $15 billion. Foresight CEO Haim Siboni is the company's controlling shareholder with 34.5% of its capital.
Foresight took advantage of the rise in its share in recent months to raise tens of millions of shekels in several financing rounds. The financing rounds added a gallery of auto industry personages to Foresight's investors, including the Dayan family, which owns a leading car trade-in dealership and other auto industry concerns; Eini-family controlled Hamizrach Holding, a controlling shareholder in Universal Motors Israel (UMI) and Avis Israel; and Tzipora and Ariel Carasso from the Carasso family, which imports Nissan and Renault cars to Israel.
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on August 10, 2017
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