Rivian Is Doomed

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 6, 9:15AM EDT

Quick Read

Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) quarterly results reveal how small the chance is that the EV maker can survive.
The disappointing news sent the stock sharply lower.
The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and Rivian wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

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Rivian Is Doomed — © PeopleImages / Getty Images

Small electric vehicle (EV) companies aren’t going to make it, especially as demand for EVs in the U.S. stagnates. Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN | RIVN Price Prediction) announced earnings, and they showed how small the chance is that it can survive as larger companies try to shoehorn themselves into the market. On the one side is Tesla, wounded but the U.S. market share leader. On the other side are legacy behemoths like GM that have invested tens of billions of dollars in what they still see as the future of the industry.

Rivian announced horrible earnings. Its loss was higher than expected. It has supply chain problems because of rare earth issues, brought on by a trade war with China. Its adjusted loss was $0.80 per share, against Wall Street expectations of $0.65. The bottom line will be worse than expected at a $2.0 billion to $2.3 billion loss this year, which is much more than the $1.7 billion to $1.9 billion loss management had forecast earlier.

Results had a tiny silver lining. Revenue for the quarter was $1.30 billion, compared to expectations of $1.28 billion.

What is truly shocking is that these numbers were for a car company that only delivered 10,611 vehicles in the second quarter. That was down 22% from the same quarter a year ago.

The news sent the stock dropping sharply, off over 6% after hours to $11.38, after a fall-off for the trading day of 2%. The stock traded at over $16 a share in May.

Rivian’s earnings press release is incredibly long and starts with a statement about Volkswagen’s $1 billion. No one with any sense cared.

Looking back, Rivian made a mistake from which it could not recover. Its R1T pickup carries a base price of $70,900. Models with more features are priced at over $100,000. America is looking for less expensive EVs, according to most research.

Rivian Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2025-2030

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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.