Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Going public is the peak.

Domestic Wei Xiaoli is in dire straits, and the experience of foreign new power car companies is also bleak.

Arrival, a British electric van company, is now embarking on a senior change in order to survive, and CEO has been forced to leave.

The start-up recently issued a statement that former CEO Dennis Sverdelof (Denis Sverdlov) resigned as CEO.

Dennis will swap positions with chairman Peter Peter Cuneo, who will become the company's interim CEO, while its president and head of strategy, Avinash Rugoobur, will also resign.

Interestingly, Peter Cuneo, the company's current interim CEO, also has another identity, the former CEO of Marvel Entertainment.

In fact, Arrival's operation has been in the doldrums over the past two years, and its share price has continued to fall while losing money. The company's share price, which reached $22 at its initial public offering, has been below $1 since the end of September 2022.

Not long ago, Arrival was exposed to the risk of bankruptcy, is currently undergoing business restructuring and actively looking for financing, if there is still no progress in March next year, Arrival will be forced to delist.

The launch is the pinnacle of Arrival was founded in 2015, the initial positioning is the development of electric trucks and buses. In the early days of the company's development, the largest order came from UPS Express, which ordered 10000 electric delivery trucks, which are scheduled to go into production in 2022.

Source Arrival is different from the concept of "mass production" pursued by Tesla. Arrival is a customized production mode of "micro-factory".

This kind of micro-factory is a light asset, similar to McDonald's, where it can be assembled and produced where there is demand, which is also a major feature of Arrival.

The period from 2020 to 2021 was the fastest growing period for Arrival, with an investment of 100 million euros from Hyundai and Kia, which made Arrival one of the most valuable start-ups in the UK, valued at 3 billion euros.

In addition, Arrival also has a special autopilot department and self-developed autopilot software and supporting hardware.

Source Arrival hardware, their self-driving vehicles are equipped with lidar, ultrasonic radar, sensing cameras and other sensors, these sensors can meet the hardware requirements of L4 self-driving.

In software, their autopilot system is part of the company's Robopilot project, which aims to design and develop autopilot systems for commercial trucks.

After the start-up went public at a valuation of more than $15 billion in May 2021, it became the largest technology IPO in the UK at the time, and ambitious Arrival opened micro-factories in both the US and the UK.

At that time, Arrival announced that it was developing autopilot systems at all levels from L0-L5, and planned to introduce a scalable commercial autopilot system to the market.

At that time, the Arrival scenery is boundless, is well-deserved unmanned freight first stock.

But the subsequent development of Arrival is not smooth. After listing, huge losses are common. Although they are "micro-factories", they are becoming more and more expensive.

In 2022, all car companies are challenged by inflation and the global supply chain crisis. As a start-up, Arrival has an even more difficult road in the market. In August, Arrival cut its production target from 400 to 20, while its second-quarter loss increased significantly from a year earlier, from $56.2 million to $89.6 million.

While the source Arrival is here, Arrival is also looking for ways to save itself. After the second quarter, Arrival announced a shift in production focus from the UK to the US, according to the company's regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Stop operating the Bicester plant in the UK and focus on opening a factory in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Arrival said on a quarterly earnings call that it was already actively raising funds and had preliminary discussions with several companies. However, with the current downturn in the macroeconomic environment, it will take about six months for funds to be put in place.

Ableson, head of Arrival's US product engineering team, said Arrival would start layoffs after financing, cutting about 700 jobs, or 30 per cent of its workforce, from 2400 to "slightly less than 1700". Of course, most of these layoffs are British employees. Accordingly, the production plan has been reduced again and again.

Losses increased further in the third quarter, with the company's net loss widening to $310.3 million from $30.6 million in 2021. Arrival has also had to announce that the company may not have enough cash to maintain its operations until the end of next year.

At the same time, it said that new funds were needed to bring the company's only product, American vans, to market.

Source: the house missed the overnight rain, and Arrival also received a delisting warning from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange that it would be delisted if the company's share price did not exceed $1 for 10 consecutive days in the next six months.

02. Marvel Entertainment's former CEO takeover, now stepping down as CEO, is the founder of Arrival, the electric van company. The resignation of the founder is a severe blow to startups.

Source: Twitter Sverdelof is a billionaire and a serial entrepreneur. In 2007, WiMAX, a new broadband wireless access technology, aroused his interest, and then he set up a communications company, Yota, in Russia.

Since then, Yota has grown rapidly into a mobile operator. In 2012, it became the first Russian company to launch LTE technology and developed its own mobile phone.

In the same year, MegaFon, a Russian mobile phone supplier, bought Yota for $1.2 billion. Although Sverdelov did not mention how much money he made from the deal, his experience in the communications industry also won him the post of deputy minister of communications.

He then moved to London, England, and raised $500 million to create Kinetik, a venture company to invest in high-tech start-ups, through which Arrival received its first investment.

He single-handedly built the concept of Arrival micro-factory.

He believes that the electrification market is changing rapidly, and that the billions of large-scale car factories that cost billions are too expensive and inflexible.

With a small amount of money, micro-factories were built without expensive stamping, painting, welding workshops and assembly lines, and two micro-factories were set up during his tenure.

During his tenure, he also helped create Roborace, a self-driving car sports competition supported by Michelin and Nvidia, to help improve self-driving car software.

With the decline of Arrival's operations, the founder was also forced to leave his position at CEO.

Immediately after leaving CEO, he said, "I am more committed than ever to ensuring the success of the coming, and I will continue to act in the best interests of the company, shareholders, customers, partners and employees."

Peter Cuneo, a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and previously non-executive chairman of Arrival's board, has a long history as interim CEO.

In addition, Cuneo is praised as one of the 10 greatest transformational CEO by foreign "Business Insider" magazines.

Source: why does CEO have anything to do with building cars before Twitter Marvel Entertainment?

This needs to start from the listing of Arrival. Arrival is a private listing in the way of SPACs (SPACs is a company that raises funds for mergers and acquisitions of target companies), which is qualified for listing through special mergers and acquisitions of CIIG companies.

The combined company was founded by Kunio, who joined Arrival's board as non-executive chairman after Arrival went public, while founder Denis Sverdlov continued to serve as CEO.

Source: the CIIG deal helped Arrival raise a total of $660 million in cash reserves, soaring the company's market capitalization to $5.4 billion, peaking at $15.3 billion a year later.

Prior to that, Cuneo was the first president and CEO of Marvel Entertainment from 1999 to 2009, until Marvel was sold to Disney for more than $4 billion at the end of 2009.

Next, although Cuneo performed the duties of interim chief executive, he still attended the board meeting as an observer.

At the beginning of its establishment, Arrival was regarded as a direct competitor of Rivian, while Rivian was also known as a "fierce competitor of Tesla", but later people found that the two companies did not seem to be the same thing.

In August 2021, Arrival cut costs by 1/3 due to capital and losses, suspending the trial of electric buses and the development of sedan projects.

As a result, Arrival currently produces only electric vans. But Arrival is more focused on self-driving unmanned distribution than electric van hardware, and after producing cars, they will directly target enterprises and travel platforms.

Source: in October of Arrival2021, Arrival completed its first self-driving demonstration of vans in a warehouse where its vehicles were able to perform all the daily operations performed by commercial fleet drivers on their own, and Arrival later said it would begin testing its self-driving functions on roads in the UK.

Not long ago, Arrival also showed off its minivan model for ride-hailing drivers.

Arrival had previously received an order for 10000 electric vans from UPS Express in the United States, which was originally expected to be shipped from the UK, but now it is highly likely that its US factories will work together to complete the order.

Source Arrival now, soaring electricity costs have led British electric car companies to face the "unbearable burden" and the hasty end of the tax cuts. In addition, a large number of L4 self-driving companies are suffering from the cold winter, either burning too much money, or commercial landing is difficult.

Although Arrival is having a hard time, its area of focus, self-driving freight, is at least more promising than self-driving companies in high-end passenger cars.

Because unmanned freight transport is easier to supervise and drive than driverless passenger cars, freight transport is mainly the logistics of trunk lines, that is, driving on relatively closed highways, and the road conditions of highways are not as complex as ordinary highways. Pedestrians and other uncontrollable factors are also relatively few.

Source: another major scene of Arrival is closed roads with fixed routes and relatively simple road conditions, such as ports or parks. This "point-to-point" fixed lines and multi-highway sections simplify the use of autopilot.

In fact, Arrival bet on the field of unmanned distribution, there are already players mixed with unboiled water, such as domestic players, the latest unmanned delivery car backed by the Great Wall, the price has been as low as 128800 yuan.

Einride, another unmanned freight start-up, is preparing to work with General Electric to deploy its fully autonomous freight trucks on American public roads and even to enter the German market.

For these unmanned vehicles, in addition to operational and technical challenges, perhaps more is the road rights division and policy access of these unmanned vehicles.

For all players, it is crossing the river by feeling the stones.

True self-driving, whether passenger or commercial, may take a long time to achieve.

A cruel reality is that many players may not be able to wait for a real self-driving landing.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: Chaodian Lab (ID:SuperEV-Lab), author: Wang Lei

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.