The electric-vehicle start-up Lucid Group reported its third-quarter financials, plus extra data on vehicle reservations, late Monday. That gave the stock another lift, despite recent eye-popping gains.
Lucid stock (ticker: LCID) closed up 23.7% on Tuesday, at $55.52, after rising about 2% in after-hours trading on Monday. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 0.4% and 0.2%, respectively.
The company reported meager sales and a loss, but earnings don’t matter much now. The company is on the cusp of delivering significant numbers of cars. The stock, simply put, is being driven by other things.
Lucid reported sales of about $232,000 and a loss of 43 cents a share, but the sales weren’t from vehicles delivered to customers. Shipments started after the quarter ended. The money came in from the use of Lucid’s battery-pack technology in the Formula E racing series.
Wall Street was expecting a loss of 25 cents a share from about $1.3 million in sales, but at this point any earnings “miss” isn’t important. Wall Street expects $1.7 billion in sales for all of 2022.
The company said that as of the end of the third quarter, it had reservations for 13,000 cars, representing about $1.3 billion in potential sales, and that the total has risen to 17,000 reservations since then. That implies it is in line to reach the $1.7 billion in sales Wall Street expects for next year. That’s good news for investors.
More good news came from Wall Street. Citigroup analyst Itay Michaeli raised his Lucid stock price target by more than 100%, to $57 a share from $28. The price boost is partly due to a higher valuation multiple assigned by the analyst and a “higher probability of our Bull vs. Bear outcomes,” wrote Michaeli. He rates shares Buy.
Lucid also said it ended the quarter with about $4.8 billion on the balance sheet.
Investors might have expecting the stock to fall after earnings. The adage “sell on the news” could certainly apply to a stock that, coming into Tuesday trading, was up more than 80% over the past month.
Two main elements are behind the month’s gains. First, Lucid has begun making deliveries, allowing it to book sales. Another item on the positive list is investors’ strong response to the Rivian Automotive (RIVN) initial public offering. Rivian sold shares to the public at $78, and the stock was above $160 on Tuesday.
At current prices, Lucid has a market capitalization of about $87 billion and is trading at roughly 50 times estimated 2022 sales.
Looking ahead, Lucid has to produce the cars its customers has reserved. “Step up in the rate [of manufacture] is a challenge. What we’ve got to do is up the number of cars we’re making [in Arizona],” CEO Peter Rawlinson tells Barron’s. “That’s my laser focus right now.”