The stockmarket fear in the US is driven by some global macro realizations. Advanced R&D will not necessarily provide a moat protecting higher cost non-BRICs business, due to IP theft.
An IT enterprise's NPV strongly rests on the IP, the applications it supports, and it's eventual market dominance, as the standard solution. WBT has great potential to achieve that position in the global industry.
Meanwhile CCP Inc, by-passes heavy product development costs, time and risks, by stealing the best proven solutions they can reproduce. Overproduces it at very cheap cost base, commoditising the industry and product segment, "ruins the market", driving all other competitors out of business.
On the plus side, as a future dominant technology, WBT's re-ram looks, in relative terms, even better in a commoditised, cost driven global market where it's cost/performance advantages will come to the fore.
The fear is to do with CCP China, the way China Inc operates:
CCP Inc closely observes outcomes overseas, with the intent of stealing any IP, business concepts and methods to replicate their successes.
This is a long established SOP. In the 1960s CCP China was famous for having copied Boeing Aircraft wholesale, reverse engineered with only a superficial grasp of the technology.
Without an abundant IP to steal from the creative, enterprising free-ish world, and demonstrated results to replicate, the communist world would have truly operated at stone-age levels.
This has been repeated over and over in multiple industries, as they move up the value chain.
IP Lawyers can inhibit CCP Inc sales derived from blatantly stolen IP within their own national jurisdictions, but CCP Inc is untouchable inside China and in to various degrees in the emerging BRICs sphere.
Westerners who work with Chinese understand the culture is very pragmatic/cynical, and the mass of people admire hard-work, digression/secrecy and wealth-creation. Some the current weaknesses of China's economy are rooted in their tendency to overproduce and obsessively reinvest in unneeded assets.
Cleverly, with their other hand CCP Inc has been a loud and active supporter of Net Zero narratives and policies globally, as well as poor to rich population movements, while totally ignoring them where they might inconvenience PRC China. BRIC's are literally are laughing at the naivety of gullible, self-destructive Westerners in their adherence to the End of History / End of the World ideologies, while simultaneously patting them on their backs.
CCP Inc takes what's useful to them, and ignores any "obligation" or "standard" that doesn't suit. And a society that acknowledges that words in themseves are empty - and only fool the weak and stupid.
For the free-ish world now, the fear that any industry, no matter how advanced or valuable the IP, is just a sitting duck awaiting certain death has broken the surface. It can only be addressed politically at a macro-economic level. There's a concept that containment is the only way, something akin to the cold war, but focused on economic defense. That why further tariffs are on the agenda in the US, to rebalance the playing field by compensating for CCP's closed economy and IP theft.
Based on track record, most likely China will steal WBTs IP for BRICS consumption. But, more than many technologies, WBT has cost and performance advantages that allow it to be produced competitively at scale by free-ish world industry in markets protected from CCP Inc pirating. And there is plenty of well-earned revenue in that.
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