Rivian Crumbles

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 1, 7:30AM EST

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Rivian Crumbles — © milosradinovic / Getty Images

Another small electric vehicle (EV) company is trying to catch Tesla, and the efforts by the world’s largest car manufacturers have continued to fall apart. Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN | RIVN Price Prediction) posted appalling earnings. (Click here for the 13 biggest electric vehicle business failures in American history.)
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Rivian shares are down over 75% in the past year as it announced earnings from its most recent quarter. Its market cap is still too high, at $17 billion, for its failures. The Wall Street Journal noted another “check engine light”: “Rivian depleted its cash reserves at a faster rate than in previous quarters, reporting that it had $11.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of Dec. 31, about $2.2 billion less than at the end of the previous three-month period.”
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D.A. Davidson Senior Equity Research Analyst Michael Shlisky said Rivian’s forecast growth rate for this year is too low to recover. The first part of the Rivian quarterly announcement showed that its production last year was also too low at 24,227. That was less than Wall Street expectations.

Rivian’s comments about high ratings, awards and cost efficiencies will be lost on Wall Street. More important, Rivian lost $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter, on revenue of only $663 million. For the year, it lost $6.8 billion, on revenue of $1.7 billion. Just as critical was that its cash balance at the end of the year was $11.6 billion, down from $18.1 billion at the end of 2021. Rivian easily could run out of money.
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Rivian’s problems spread beyond its financials. It must make progress against industry leaders. The first is the troubled Ford F-150 Lightning, which, when its production problems end, will sell into a market with millions of F-150 gasoline-powered pickups.
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The two other highly successful pickups in America, the Chevy Silverado and Ram, will come to market with electric versions soon. If Tesla ever gets its act together, its Cybertruck will be available in a year.

Rivian is just too small and too slow to market.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.