Several EV makers have been seeking to lay claim to being Tesla’s top competitor, but after seeing its stock close up nearly 30% on its first day of trading, Rivian may be the best one to have the title.
Less than two months after building its first production vehicle, the R1T electric pickup, to a customer, the company went old school in its move to the stock market with an initial public offering on Nasdaq.
The company’s stock opened at $78 per share — giving it a valuation of $66.5 billion — with 153 million shares of common stock available, which was bigger than initially planned. The stock jumped up to nearly $120 per share midday before settling down to close at $100.73 per share.
The gross proceeds from the offering to Rivian, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses payable by Rivian, are expected to be approximately $11.9 billion, excluding any exercise of the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares. The company sent out an email not long after the market opened.
“Today we started our journey as a publicly traded company — this is the result of the incredible efforts of our team and your enthusiasm and support for what we are building. Thank you,” the company wrote in the email.
“We made the decision to go public to help us achieve the largest possible impact. Becoming a public company enables us to accelerate our efforts to help society transition to sustainable transportation and energy systems.”
Big winners
Naturally, Rivian sees a massive benefit from the strong response from investors, but it’s not the only one benefitting.
Amazon is one of the biggest investors in the company and will see a nice multi-billion bump to its bottom line; however, the second biggest winner may be Ford, which has also invested more than $800 million in the startup electric vehicle maker.
Ford also holds about $400 million of convertible debt sold by Rivian. The stock obtained on conversion is included in the 102 million shares Ford owns.
The company’s not addressed what it will do with its investment other than describing how it will record that profit on its books during its most recent earnings call. In fact, at one point during the day, it was estimated Ford’s stake in Rivian was worth about $10 billion — more than 10% its own market cap of about $80 billion. Rivian’s market cap settled at $98.9 billion at close: higher than either Ford or General Motors.
However, the company’s not been specific about what it plans to do with that influx of cash, but it’s safe to assume some of that money will go to further development of its own electric vehicles.
