Rivian goes public in one of the biggest IPOs ever
Electric vehicle startup Rivian is now a publicly traded company after executing one of the biggest initial public offerings in history. Rivian shares started trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange Wednesday at around $78 per share. That gave Rivian an overall valuation of nearly $80 billion and helped it net $12 billion in fresh cash, despite the fact that it only just recently started to make and ship its first electric pickup trucks.
Rivian and Its IPO
It’s the sixth-largest IPO ever on a US stock exchange, according to Bloomberg, and it’s hard to imagine the company picking a better time to debut. Tesla has generated an incredible amount of interest in electric vehicles and is now one of the most highly valued companies in the world. The public markets have also been on an outrageous run over the last few years — a run that was supercharged over the last 18 months by an influx of retail traders and a boom in electric vehicle companies going public.
A scorching debut in an already hot stock market
Rivian, which has a steady CEO and founder and relatively modest goals for the next few years, could be a good test of all that hype. It has received a little more than 55,000 preorders for its pricey electric pickup truck (the R1T) and SUV (the R1S) and has said it won’t be able to deliver all of those until the end of 2023. Where other EV startups went public with big promises of near-term growth, Rivian has been very conservative in the few estimates it’s offered for what the next few years look like and has instead emphasized that it will be largely focused on making vans for Amazon, which owns about 20 percent of the startup.
And yet, shares of Rivian jumped to $106 as they began trading on the Nasdaq exchange Wednesday and climbed from there, lifting the company’s valuation well over $100 billion — higher than all other automakers on the planet, save for Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and China’s BYD.
Rivian is no Tesla
Rivian’s eye-watering valuation will likely reinforce lazy comparisons to Tesla, despite the fact that the startup is beginning production at a time when there’s an observable desire for electric vehicles — which wasn’t the case when Tesla started out, to put it mildly. And while many will likely view Rivian’s valuation as a prime example of how hot the stock market is, at least one legacy automaker has already tried to make the case that it’s justified: General Motors CEO Mary Barra said Wednesday that Rivian’s valuation proves that older automakers are “so undervalued.” (GM nearly had a deal in place to become a major investor in Rivian in 2019 before the startup backed out and took on money from its crosstown rival, Ford.)
About E. J. McKay
E.J. McKay is a Shanghai-headquartered investment bank with a special focus on mergers & acquisitions. We are one of the most long standing independent investment banks in China, with core business of mergers & acquisitions and financing advisory.