Rivian management highlights growing pains as the EV maker ramps up manufacturing
Contributor since / Followers
Spencer Platt/Getty Images News
Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ:RIVN) is up for the week following separate appearances by management at investor conferences.
During the Morgan Stanley Laguna conference on Wednesday, CEO RJ Scaringe said the electric vehicle maker had a couple of supplier issues recently that have been challenging and impacted near-term production rates.
Meanwhile, earlier in the week at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, CFO Claire McDonough said Rivian (RIVN) is working day in and day out to resolve the supplier challenges and issues, but it has impacted how the company thinks about the availability of its full variance of products right now from a consumer standpoint. “So if you go, for example, on our website, and you look for an R1T, there’s very limited supply of R1Ts, given the way that we ramped up production over the course of Q2 and into Q3, starting first with our R1S, you know, standard pack product, introducing our Max Pack product, and building from there,” she highlighted.
McDonough spelled out that the overall composition of the 215,000 units of installed capacity that Rivian (RIVN) will have out of the Normal, Illinois, plant by 2026 will be split between a total maximum capacity of 155,000 units of R2 available volume, 85,000 units of potential in R1, and then 65,000 units of potential volume with the commercial van program.
“Those figures don’t add up to 215K, and so that gives us the opportunity to flex between our shift patterns, between each of the three vehicle lines, to optimize for gross profit, optimize for the demand environment that we’re seeing at the time, and gives us a lot of financial flexibility as we think about the composition of our performance and production plan.”
Read the full transcript of Rivian’s (RIVN) presentation at the Goldman Sachs conference.
Shares of Rivian (RIVN) were up 5.3% in Wednesday afternoon trading, but still show a 40% decline for 2024 amid a bruising reset by investors on the EV sector. The next catalyst for Rivian (RIVN) could be the Q3 deliveries report, which is due out in about three weeks.