It hasn’t all been plain sailing for Rivian since the EV startup first hit the stock exchange in 2021 and each share in the company commanded a hefty $129.95. Fast forward to this month and those same shares have plunged nearly 90 percent, including a 20 percent drop this year, and are currently trading at just $14.74.
And there’s more bad news this week. Rivian’s poor performance has resulted in it losing its spot on the prestigious Nasdaq 100. The index lists the 100 biggest non-financial firms on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange and includes heavy hitters like Apple and Microsoft.
Rivian is being removed because its stock was weighted as less than 0.1 percent of the index in April and May. The Nasdaq 100 normally removes its smallest members after two consecutive months of being that low, and just as JPMorgan Chase analyst Min Moon predicted last month, Rivian is out.
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Moon also correctly predicted Rivian’s replacement in the Nasdaq 100. The incoming company is On Semiconductor, which is located in Arizona and is in the business of supplying chips to automakers building electric cars. Talk about a cruel irony.
Other EV startups like Lucid, Nikola and Lordstown, have all had a tough time lately, suffering falling share prices. Nikola received a delisting notice from Nasdaq in May because its shares had been trading below $1 for 30 consecutive days and Lordstown had to perform a reverse stock split to save its shares from dipping below $1 and the company suffering the same fate.
What all of these firms has in common is that their valuations were way out of sync with the number of cars they had produced, or were going to produce any time soon, and made legacy automakers’ stock look dirt cheap. But the original EV startup, Tesla, which has proved itself a viable force in the auto industry, has bounced back after its stock fell to a two-year low in January of this year.