Take Liberty Defense over Patriot One, this portfolio manager says

Take your pick.

Investors may have a tough time choosing between these two names, both of which are Canadian-listed emerging tech companies with hopes of offering the industry standard in concealed weapons technology. So how do investors choose between Patriot One Technologies (Patriot One Technologies Stock Quote, Chart TSX:PAT) and Liberty Defense Holdings (Liberty Defense Stock Quote, Chart TSXV:SCAN)? Simple, says Robert McWhirter of Selective Asset Management. Based on enterprise value, Liberty Defense is the cheaper pickup.

“Overall, the big debate at the moment is about valuation,” said McWhirter, in conversation with BNN Bloomberg last Friday. “Patriot One has a market cap of $318 million but they have $71 million in cash, so the market cap minus cash gives you an enterprise value of $247 million. When you compare that to Liberty Defense, their market cap is $55-million.”

“So you end up saying, okay, their technologies are fairly similar from a broad concept viewpoint and their niche in the marketplace is similar but here we can Liberty trading at approximately one-quarter of the value,” says McWhirter.

Both stocks are relatively new entries, with Liberty Defense having commenced trading on the Venture exchange last week and Patriot One coming on the scene last year, with its graduation to the TSX also coming last week. Liberty opened last Tuesday at $0.90 per share and closed the week at $0.88 per share, while Patriot One is up 33 per cent year-to-date and up 27.6 per cent over the past 12 months.

Both companies are use AI-enabled scanning technology to detect concealed weapons —Liberty Defense has the Hexwave system while the Patriot One has its Patscan MultiLiberty Defence platform. late in March, Patriot One announced a partnership with big US defence contractor Raytheon Company, while for its part, Liberty Defense is undergoing a pilot project with the City of Vancouver.

McWhirter says the potential for growth in the weapons detection industry is huge, one that both companies intend on tapping into.

“Liberty says that they’re approximately one to one-and-a-half years behind Patriot One with the development of technology and Patriot One acquired another company’s technology about two months ago for the detection of airborne particles to add to a suite of technologies. Overall, we think that there’s great opportunities for growth in the whole industry and in both companies,” he says.

“At the moment, on a relative basis Liberty Defense appears to be cheaper at one-quarter of the market cap compared to Patriot One,” he adds.