Prediction: IonQ Puts a Multiyear Revenue Number on the Board Tuesday
Quantum computing company IonQ (IONQ +1.28%) hosts an investor day on Tuesday, Sept. 8. And I expect the event to produce something the company has never put in its guidance: a revenue forecast that reaches beyond the current year.Second-quarter revenue rose 287% year over year to about $80 million, the company's fifth consecutive quarter of record results, up from about $65 million in the first quarter of this year. And management has raised its 2026 revenue guidance twice, from an initial range of $225 million to $245 million in February to $280 million to $290 million today.But every one of those figures stops at Dec. 31. Meanwhile, shares trade near $39 as of this writing, giving IonQ a market value of about $15.5 billion -- about 54 times the midpoint of this year's guided sales.In other words, the years actually supporting the price are years management has never guided to. My prediction is that this changes on Tuesday. Image source: The Motley Fool. Good guidance, short horizonIonQ's record as a forecaster is strong. The company delivered $130 million of revenue in 2025, up 202% year over year and 20% above the midpoint of its own guidance. That result, the company says, made it the first public quantum company to top $100 million in annual GAAP revenue.What management has never done is put a year beyond the current one into its guidance. Even at the second-quarter report in early August, with the company's $1.8 billion acquisition of chipmaker SkyWater Technology closed just days earlier, management went no further than the current year."Because we have operated as a combined company for less than a week, we need to integrate our operations before providing combined company revenue or EBITDA guidance," said Inder Singh, IonQ's chief operating officer and chief financial officer, on the earnings call.Singh did sketch a timeline, to be fair. Investors, he suggested, could get "color at Analyst Day perhaps, but certainly at the close of quarter."The full combin
