The US electric car maker and shooting star Rivian failed when it presented its first figures on the stock market. The company will miss the production target of 1200 electric pick-ups this year by a few hundred cars, the company announced on Thursday evening after the US stock market closed in Irvine, California. To ramp up production is more difficult than expected, said company boss Robert Scaringe in an analyst conference. That caused disappointment among investors, the share fell after the hours of trading by more than eleven percent. In addition, the rival of the electrical pioneer Tesla presented a net loss of 1.2 billion US dollars (1.1 billion euros). The company is still hardly generating any sales with its products.
Rivian was founded in 2009. Since the beginning of 2019, the company has raised capital totaling $ 10.5 billion in several financing rounds. The company went public in November and made a brilliant debut. Rivian makes electric pick-ups and had sparked the imagination of investors. The US competitor Tesla is by far the most valuable carmaker in the world, because professional investors are betting on a great future with manufacturers who are purely focused on electric drives. In the meantime, Rivian was even more valuable on the stock exchange than the Volkswagen Group, which plans to deliver nine million vehicles this year and employs around 675,000 people.
The euphoria surrounding the newcomer to the stock exchange subsided somewhat. Most recently, Rivian’s market capitalization was still at $ 97 billion – before it went downhill on Thursday after hours. For comparison: Volkswagen is meanwhile at 119 billion euros. Rivian announced in November that tens of thousands of its fully electric R1T pick-ups had already been ordered.
Rivian announced plans to build another factory. The electric car manufacturer’s second plant is to be built in the state of Georgia. Investments of five billion dollars are planned, more than 7,500 people are expected to work there. The factory is expected to produce up to 400,000 cars a year; the first cars are to be manufactured in 2024. The production capacity of the existing plant in Normal in the state of Illinois is to be increased from the previously planned 150,000 to 200,000.
The electric car market is experiencing a surge in demand around the world as consumers become more environmentally conscious and choose environmentally friendly vehicles. Tesla produced a record number of cars in the past quarter and is building factories around the world.