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Lucid sold $3 billion in stock needed to build its business. Shares are lower following the sale.
Courtesy Lucid Motors
Luxury EV maker
Lucid
just raised enough money to keep it going through the middle of 2025. What’s good for the company, however, isn’t good for the stock.
Wednesday, Lucid (ticker: LCID) announced about $3 billion in stock sales with 60% of the new shares sold to Saudi Arabian investors. That keeps Saudi ownership of Lucid stock at about 60%.
Shares sold to the public were priced at about $6.91 each. Shares sold to the Saudi investors were priced at about $6.77. Lucid stock closed Wednesday at $7.76 a share. Sometimes companies need to price large blocks of stock at a discount to fund enough buyers to complete a deal.
Lucid stock is at $6.89 in premarket trading Thursday, down about 11.2%.
S&P 500
and
Nasdaq Composite
futures are up about 0.2% and 0.1%, respectively.
It’s a large drop, partly reflecting what new investors paid. Still, no one can be too surprised that Lucid raised fresh capital. The company ended the first quarter with about $3.4 billion in cash and $4.1 billion in total liquidity.
The Q1 cash balance should have been enough to fund Lucid’s business through the middle of 2024, according to Wall Street estimates. Lucid has been using about $1 billion in cash per quarter in recent quarters. That’s still a year away, but companies can’t really wait until the 11th hour to raise funds.
With the added $3 billion, Lucid should have enough cash to last about another year. More capital will be needed down the road. Wall Street projects the company will use about $9 billion between the final three quarters of 2023 and all of 2027 to build its business.
Needing billions to start a car company from scratch is not unusual.
Tesla
(TSLA) used about $9 billion before it started generating positive free cash flow consistently. And it took the company about a decade after shipping its first Roadster to reach that cash flow milestone. Lucid shipped its first cars in late 2021.
Coming into Thursday trading, Lucid stock is down about 60% over the past 12 months. Rising interest rates, slowing sales growth, more EV competition, and now new stock sales, have sapped some investor enthusiasm for Lucid shares.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com