Earnings
Earnings season is in full swing. Next week, we’ll be watching Aeye, Canoo, Innoviz, Lordstown, Rivian and Workhorse.
Here is a rundown of some mobility companies that reported Q1 earnings.
Aurora
The AV developer reported an operating loss of $143 million, a slight improvement from the $192 million loss in the same year-ago period. Its net loss this quarter was $77 million, down from $189 million last year.
Its Q1 report included a term you don’t see everyday. It’s called “collaboration revenue” — Aurora took in $42 million — for development work associated with the company’s agreement with Toyota, which will support its planned ride-hailing product. Ultimately, collaboration revenue is not revenue, and as a pre-revenue company, Aurora declined to provide any guidance, allowing the company to finish its call, including Q&A, in about 30 minutes.
Lyft
Welp. Investors sure didn’t like what they saw. Shares are down more than 33% since the ride-hailing company reported Q1 earnings May 3.
Tl;dr: The company beat revenue expectations but it wasn’t enough to quell concerns over a few other metrics, including a notable decline in per-rider revenue compared to Q4 2021 levels, and a second quarter of sequential declines in active ridership. Lyft’s contribution result — which is essentially its ride-hailing top line minus revenue costs, with certain items added back in — of $502.5 million in Q1 2021 was also smaller than what it recorded in both Q3 and Q4 of 2021.
TC+ editor Alex Wilhelm dug in a little deeper to root out why investors were so uneasy. The market seems to be focused on slightly soft guidance on revenue growth in Q2 2022 as well as the cost of driver incentives.
That labor problem likely won’t go away. So what about Uber? The company also beat revenue expectations and unlike Lyft seems to be in a better position in terms of driver supply.
Lucid Group
The EV automaker closed out the quarter with $57.7 million in revenue, driven mainly by customer deliveries of 360 vehicles over the three months ended March 31. That’s up massively from the $313,000 the company pulled in during the same quarter last year. It’s also more than analysts’ expectations of $53.43 million, according to Yahoo Finance estimates.
The company experienced a net loss of $81.3 million during the first quarter, an improvement on the loss of $748 million last year.
The Lucid 10Q provided an update on its legal matters. The company has few lawsuits from investors who largely allege the company made false and misleading statements regarding the expected start of production for the Lucid Air, as well as an SEC probe regarding its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. IV and Atieva Inc.
The company also announced that it was raising prices of the variants of its luxury Air sedan, beginning June 1. The price hikes push the base price of the Air sedan as much as 13%.
TuSimple
Back in March, it was reported that TuSimple was thinking of selling off its China business. The company has since confirmed this, saying that the company’s stock price today doesn’t reflect the value of the China autonomous freight business during its Q1 2022 earnings call this week. It would therefore be good business to split the Asia-Pacific operations off and seek other pools of capital that would ascribe the proper value to that stock, TuSimple’s executives said.
It might be true that TuSimple, which has stated that it’s a U.S.-focused company, wants to separate itself from its China business due to monetary concerns, but not necessarily for the reasons they say.
Investments in TuSimple by Sun Dream Inc, a Sina affiliate, resulted in a review last year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS concluded that review in February, and as part of the resolution, TuSimple entered into a National Security Agreement (NSA) with the agency, which includes: adopting a technology control plan, appointing a security officer and security director, establishing a government security committee to be chaired by the security director and periodically meeting with and reporting to certain CFIUS monitoring agencies.
The risk factors outlined in TuSimple’s 10Q reveal that the company has already incurred substantial costs adhering to the NSA and expects to continue to incur costs. It also revealed that the company is a bit nervous about the agency’s far-reaching authority into its company.
The tl;dr here is that maybe peeling off TuSimple’s China operations is a smart financial decision, but it’s possible that’s less to do with the market and more to do with the expensive regulatory headaches the company is facing by U.S. agencies for straddling this particularly taut geo-political fence.
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