Rivian Automotive’s stock prices fell about 13 percent in trading after reports emerged that Ford sold around 8 million of its shares in the EV startup between late Sunday and Monday morning.
CNBC reported this weekend that both Ford and JPMorgan Chase were planning large sales of shares after the insider lockup period expired Sunday. That prevented early investors from selling shares in the immediate aftermath of Rivian’s initial public offering (IPO) in order to avoid the market from being flooded.
On Monday, citing “sources familiar with the move”, The Wall Street Journal said that Ford sold around 8 million shares while CNBC reported that JPMorgan Chase is planning to offload around 13 million to 15 million Rivian shares for an “undisclosed stakeholder”.
Both Ford’s and JPMorgan Chase‘s blocks will be priced at $26.90 per share, a discount of 6.7 percent as compared to what they were worth when trading closed on Friday, reports Bloomberg. At that price, the automaker’s 8 million shares would be worth a little more than $215 million while the bank’s 13 to 15 million shares would be worth between $349 and $403.5 million.
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In all, the block of shares that Ford sold amounts to just under eight percent of its holdings in the EV startup. The legacy automaker bought 102 million shares in Rivian before it went public in November of 2021.
After its IPO, the EV manufacturer’s shares shot up quickly, briefly bringing its market value to more than $100 billion. That made it more valuable than Ford or GM at the time and it became the sixth-largest IPO in U.S. history. Its share price didn’t stay that high, though.
Since then, Rivian has struggled to ramp up production at its plant in Normal, Illinois. That has caused it to halve its vehicle production outlook for 2022. In combination with a PR misstep related to vehicle prices, that caused the automaker’s share prices to dip by more than 50 percent in the first three months of the year.
Although Ford initially announced that it would co-develop a Lincoln branded EV with Rivian, by November of 2021, the Detroit automaker had canceled those plans. By February of this year, Ford’s CEO Jim Farley acknowledged that its investment in another American company making electric pickups and delivery vehicles was a little awkward, but said that he had always “seen this as a strategic investment.”