Just days after Lucid Group began delivering its distinctive Air electric vehicles in the European Union, the young Tesla challenger is now establishing a presence in the Middle East, with the first batch of EV deliveries taking place in Saudi Arabia in the last few hours. According to the Twitter account @SaudiEV, one of the first Air EV deliveries took place on January 1, 2023 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city. Of course, this news comes only days after the Lucid Air Dream Edition electric vehicle began delivery in Germany and the Netherlands.
The Lucid Group’s proprietary 900-volt-plus electrical architecture enables effective charging of its EVs. When combined with a 300+ kW DC fast charger, the Lucid Air Grand Touring edition can add 400 km of range in just 15 minutes.
Lucid Group was able to decisively address worries about a potential cash crunch that the company was widely expected to confront in 2023 by the end of December 2022. First, the business completed its at-the-market offering, which was announced in November, raising around $600 million by selling 56.2 million shares.
Second, Lucid Group announced that it would raise about $915 million through a private placement of shares by selling some of its shares to the Ayar Third Investment Company, an associate of the Saudi PIF. In total, the company has gained $1.515 billion in new liquidity to strengthen its cash position, which stood at $3.85 billion at the end of Q3 2022 and was made up of cash, cash equivalents, and investments.
With a Total Addressable Market (TAM) of only about 15% in the United States, some experts are wary about Lucid Group’s financial viability prospects.
After all, the corporation is already consuming approximately $1 billion in cash per quarter. The company’s cash position would have dropped to an estimated $2.85 billion by the end of December 2022 if the recent capital raising exercise had not occurred. However, with the infusion of new liquidity, the company is anticipated to complete the fourth quarter of 2022 with $4.365 billion in cash – more than enough to finance the entire fiscal year 2023.
Reservations for the Lucid Gravity SUV will be available in 2023, with deliveries slated to begin in 2024. To refresh your memory, Lucid Group’s AMP-1 facility in Casa Grande, Arizona, has a current production capacity of 34,000 units per year. The plant is getting a second assembly line to handle the manufacturing of the Lucid Gravity SUV. The facility’s yearly production capacity will grow to 90,000 automobiles per year once the refurbishment is completed. Separately, Saudi Arabia has gave Lucid Group around $3 billion in incentives in order to develop a 155,000-unit-per-year manufacturing facility in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has also agreed to buy up to 100,000 electric vehicles from the corporation over the following ten years.
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