Rivian is sticking to its goal of delivering 25,000 electric vehicles by the end of the year, but getting there now expects to burn an additional $700 million.
The carmaker put the revised guidelines in its second quarter earnings report, telling investors it expects to lose as much as $5.45 billion in 2022, up from the $4.75 billion estimates it shared three months earlier. Rivian attributes the increase to several factors, including “challenges in the supply chain” and “commodity inflation.”
In the second quarter, Rivian lost $1.71 billion and delivered 4,467 vehicles. Those deliveries include the automaker’s SUV and truck, as well as the vans it builds for Amazon. (In total, Rivian delivered 5,694 vehicles in the first half of the year.)
Still, Rivian surpassed analysts’ revenue expectations, bringing in $364 million in the second quarter (or about $26 million more than analysts expected, according to Yahoo Finance). Demand for the EV company’s SUVs and trucks also continued to rise; the backlog of preorders reached 98,000 at the end of June, Rivian told investors.
The company also announced the addition of former Bosch and Daimler exec Harald Kroeger to the board.
Over the past few months, Rivian has comfortably moved away from its 52-week low of $19.25 a share. That slump came in May, when Ford millions of Rivian shares dumped. Today, the fledgling EV maker ended regular trading at $38.95 a share, or a 4% increase.
Last month, Rivian began laying off about 6% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan prompted by a changing and challenging economic environment, where inflation reached record highs, interest rates rose and commodity prices continued their upward trajectory.
The production team at the Normal, Illinois plant was unaffected by layoffs.
