Fisker Is Falling Apart

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 21, 10:51AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Fisker Is Falling Apart — © Marcus Lindstrom / iStock via Getty Images

Fisker (NYSE: FSR) is among the army of tiny electric car companies chasing Tesla and the multinational manufacturers in the race for EV market share. It needs to be bigger to be competitive, and recent news about its business shows its deep trouble. At one point, the stock was considered a “buy.”

Fisker grabbed headlines as it lost another chief accounting officer. Two have departed in just a few months. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Florus Beuting, who was named chief accounting officer in early November, has left the automaker, the company said in a regulatory filing Monday.”

The news was on top of other bad news. The NYSE flagged Fisker for late filing of important documents. Fisker has yet to release its last quarterly financial statement to the SEC on time. The NYSE gave the company six months for Fisker from November 14 to file this. Because of this, there is a chance the company will be delisted, a terrible blow to any public company that trades on a major exchange.

Although Fisker did not file a 10-Q with the SEC, it did release third-quarter results in a less-than-complete way. The company said it had delivered a meager 1,097 of its “Ocean” models during the period. By contrast, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) delivered over 400,000 vehicles in the same period. Fisker also cut its production targets, indicating its weak manufacturing capacity. Tesla also has a huge EV engine charger network. (See How Many Tesla Superchargers Each State Has)

In the third quarter, Fisker lost $91 million on $72 million in revenue. It had only $527 million of cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet. Cash will be gone in a little over five quarters at the current burn rate.

Fisker’s stock trades at $2.35, which makes it a “penny stock.” The price is down almost 90% in the last two years. There is no evidence that the shares can regain any meaningful portion of that loss.

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.