Being poured tens of billions of dollars by Ford and Amazon to fight Tesla, the stock of the most popular electric car company in 2021 evaporated two-thirds of its value after less than two months on the floor.

Tram Ho

In the context of many giants in the world investing in the electric vehicle industry, even companies that have no experience in manufacturing cars in the past. With such great heat in the electric vehicle industry, the giant Amazon in an effort to diversify its portfolio has also begun to pay attention to startups in this field. They chose Rivian – an electric vehicle company with a pickup truck product that is said to be able to compete fairly with giant Tesla in the next few years.

Rivian was founded in 2009 by Mr. RJ Scaringe – a former MIT student and started researching and producing self-driving electric cars 2 years later. The company’s first product was a sports car called Avera for the US market, but it was not really successful.

Even so, in 2015, the company received a large investment and began opening research facilities in the Michigan and Bay Area areas; At the same time, Rivian was also negotiating to take over the closed Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois. In 2017, the company officially owned this factory for 16 million USD and made it their main factory in North America.

After receiving a strategic investment from Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation at the end of 2017, the company quickly increased in size by hiring more personnel. At the same time, instead of continuing with sports cars, they turned to SUVs and pickup trucks. At the auto event in Los Angeles at the end of 2018, Rivian introduced two of its new products: a 5-seater pickup truck and an electric 7-seater SUV, named A1T and A1C (later announced by the company. ty changed to R1T and R1S).

Được Ford và Amazon rót cả chục tỷ USD để đấu Tesla, cổ phiếu của hãng xe điện đình đám nhất 2021 bốc hơi 2/3 giá trị sau chưa đầy 2 tháng lên sàn - Ảnh 1.
Two Rivian cars were introduced at the LA Auto Show in 2018 (Image: Ryan Denham)

The two cars are described as having put a lot of time and effort into the Rivian team. In particular, their pickup is expected to compete directly with Cybertruck – the outstanding model of the same type of giant Tesla.

According to the company’s announcement, the two cars are capable of traveling with a distance of 314 and 316 miles, respectively (more than 500 km). The selling price of R1T and R1S falls at about $ 67,500 and $ 70,000 for the lowest version. The price of the R1T is quite competitive with the Cybertruck ($69,900), while the SUV is much cheaper when placed next to the Tesla Model S ($79,990).

In September, there were 48,390 orders for two Rivian cars in Canada and the US, showing the great appeal of this product. R1T and R1S completely raised Rivian with investors, and it was not long before huge sums of money were poured into the company.

Được Ford và Amazon rót cả chục tỷ USD để đấu Tesla, cổ phiếu của hãng xe điện đình đám nhất 2021 bốc hơi 2/3 giá trị sau chưa đầy 2 tháng lên sàn - Ảnh 2.
The R1T is considered the leading counterweight of Tesla CyberTruck (Image: InsideEV)

To date, Rivian has received more than $10 billion in investments from Amazon, Ford Motor and several Wall Street companies; This money is used for research, development and business purposes, which the company says will cost up to 8 billion USD by the end of 2023. At the same time, it also received orders for 100,000 electric vehicles to use to delivery until the end of 2030 from its own big investor, Amazon.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company has poured $1.8 billion into Rivian, making it one of its biggest investors and customers. Besides Amazon, Ford has also invested $1.4 billion and Rowe Price Fund has invested $2.6 billion in Rivian recently.

By the end of 2020, the company has plans to bring the R1T and R1S to customers in mid-2021, after the lowest versions of both cars have been fully pre-ordered. However, this plan has to be delayed until August, and is expected to reach consumers in January next year due to a global shortage of memory chips.

Được Ford và Amazon rót cả chục tỷ USD để đấu Tesla, cổ phiếu của hãng xe điện đình đám nhất 2021 bốc hơi 2/3 giá trị sau chưa đầy 2 tháng lên sàn - Ảnh 3.
Rivian’s car factory (Image: Lyndon French, The NY Times)

However, like many other electric vehicle start-ups, Rivian is suffering a large loss because the investment in research and development costs a lot of money. In 2020, the company suffered a loss of up to 1.02 billion USD. By 2021, by the end of the first 6 months of the year, they continued to have a negative profit of 994 million USD, bringing the total accumulated loss to nearly 2 billion USD. The company also does not expect to turn a profit in the near future, as it still needs to do a lot of research and compete with many other start-ups in the electric vehicle manufacturing market.

In early November 2021, Rivian fixed the IPO price at $78/share. mobilized 12 billion USD. Closing the session, Rivian closed at 100 USD/share and then continued to gallop up to approximately 180 USD in the following 4 sessions, corresponding to a market capitalization of more than 161 billion USD.

However, since then, it has been a continuous decline, Rivian stock has lost two-thirds of its value, once falling to $ 50 at the end of the first week of February at $ 60.87 with a capitalization of $ 55 billion. – this is also the expected valuation of VinFast when IPO this year.

Được Ford và Amazon rót cả chục tỷ USD để đấu Tesla, cổ phiếu của hãng xe điện đình đám nhất 2021 bốc hơi 2/3 giá trị sau chưa đầy 2 tháng lên sàn - Ảnh 4.

Like many other electric car companies, Rivian has launched breakthrough products that attract customers. They even receive the trust from Amazon with orders of up to 100,000 cars by 2030, showing that the company’s reputation with investors is not small. However, the challenge in the coming years for Rivian is still profitability, as they face great competition from other competitors as well as pressure from investors with huge expectations for this company.

Được Ford và Amazon rót cả chục tỷ USD để đấu Tesla, cổ phiếu của hãng xe điện đình đám nhất 2021 bốc hơi 2/3 giá trị sau chưa đầy 2 tháng lên sàn - Ảnh 5.
Rivian is still the 10th largest company by market capitalization in the world

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Source : Genk