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

The stride is too big, and it's pulling.

Author | Cao Tingting Truman

The cold wave of new cars built in the United States continues.

The latest, Mullen Automotive, an electric car start-up based in Southern California, has just been delisted by Nasdaq because its share price has long been below $1.

This is the second time that Mullen has received a delisting warning.

In fact, compared with the new forces in Taiwan, Mullen is not "too new," and the history of car construction can be traced back to more than a decade ago. although people are relatively new to this company, Mullen and future cars in China have made eye contact with each other.

Just at the beginning of this year, the two sides also signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly expand the American market and launch the localization future K50 in the United States.

For now, however, Mullen has some difficulties in protecting itself. It is reported that Mullen has submitted a request to Nasdaq for a hearing to "extend the time and put forward a plan for re-compliance".

By yesterday's close, Mullen's offer had fallen to $0.425 a share, with a market capitalization of just $78.23 million.

Source: Yahoo Finance01, reverse dismantling and dismantling on Sept. 7, Mullen issued an announcement saying it had received a delisting notice from the Nasdaq listing qualification department. The notice letter said that because the shares failed to maintain the minimum purchase price of $1, nor did they meet the Nasdaq listing requirements before the prescribed deadline (September 5, 2023).

Source: Mullen according to Nasdaq requirements, listed companies will receive delisting warnings if their share prices fall below $1 for 30 consecutive days.

If Mullen has no objection to this, it will be officially removed from Nasdaq on September 15 this year.

As a result, Mullen rushed to request the Nasdaq listing qualification Committee to hold a hearing, further extend the time, and put forward a plan to re-comply with Nasdaq listing rules 5550 (a) (2).

Trading in Mullen's shares has been suspended before a final decision is made, and the qualification committee has great power, including whether to grant Mullen a grace period of 180 days from September 5, 2023.

Source: Mullen, so it's not easy to say whether Mullen will get what it wants next. Mullen said in the announcement that there is no guarantee that the Nasdaq listing qualification committee will approve the extension of the compliance period.

In fact, Mullen's share price has been falling in a parabola for nearly half a year, falling from nearly $5 in March to less than $0.50 today.

Source: Yahoo Finance before that, Mullen tried more than once to save the stock price, first implementing a reverse stock split plan of 25% in May and a reverse split of 9 shares in August, with every 9 shares of reverse split automatically merged into 1 share.

Reverse split is also a common practice adopted by listed companies in low stock prices. The number of shares issued by the company is reduced, but the proportion of shares held by shareholders will not change, which can raise the share price and keep the overall market capitalization unchanged, but it also means that there will be fewer shares available for Mullen.

Can only say that the reverse split is useful, but not big. Since August 16, Mullen's share price has been below the $1 threshold demanded by Nasnak.

Source: in addition to the long-term depressed share price of Mullen, the financial situation of Mullen is not optimistic.

For the fiscal year ended September 30, 2021, Mullen's operating expenses were $22.4 million, resulting in a net loss of $44.2 million.

By September 30, 2022, Mullen had operating expenses of nearly $97 million and a net loss of $740 million, a direct expansion of nearly 20-fold.

The latest second-quarter results show that Mullen posted a net loss of $308.9 million in three months, or an average loss of $100 million a month.

Source: while Mullen's losses have widened, Mullen's mass production plans for new cars have been repeatedly delayed. Mullen plans to start production at a new plant in Tunika, Mississippi in the third quarter of this year and begin delivery in the second quarter of 2024.

At present, it seems that there is no end in sight.

02. Music producer Mullen Automotive, founded on April 20, 2010, is a Southern California-based car company that has always focused on the US market and aims to produce electric products that can be fully integrated into the lives of American consumers.

Unlike the bosses of other new power car companies, David Michery, the founder of Mullen Automotive, was a musician before he built cars.

Source: before Twitter founded Mullen Technologies, Michery had a 27-year career in the music industry, and his record company was successfully transformed into a multimedia company.

After David Michery left the music industry, with the determination of "providing clean transportation for everyone", he acquired Mullen Motor Company and CODA Motor Company, and renamed the company Mullen Automotive in 2014.

In other words, as a layman building cars, David Michery is so aware of his shortcomings that he chooses to buy directly to realize his dream of building cars.

CODA Automotive was founded in 2009. You know, CODA was once one of only two certified electric vehicle companies in the United States to sell electric vehicles in the United States, and the other was Tesla.

Source: CODA and then Mullen Motor Cars, founded in 2002, was the manufacturer of Mullen GT, the first electric supercar on the market in 2007. The Mullen GT was rated by Forbes magazine as the seventh fastest mass-produced car in the United States in 2006.

With the acquisition of the two electric car companies, David Michery launched a car-building program and created an energy division that eventually became Mullen's renewable energy and research and development center.

At the Los Angeles auto show in November 2021, Mullen unveiled its Mullen FIVE, a predecessor of the MX-05, based on an electric skateboard platform and equipped with a 95kWh battery pack that can travel 325 miles on a single charge and recharge up to 80 per cent in 21 minutes.

Source: MullenMullen says the basic version can achieve 0-60 mph acceleration in 3.2s, and the entry-level version starts at $55000. Mullen plans to start production at a new plant in Tunica, Mississippi in the third quarter of 2023 and begin delivery in the second quarter of 2024.

In fact, after the acquisition of the two companies, Mullen is not a successful company, Mullen in the fourth quarter of 2020, the net loss reached $4.9 million, a year later, that figure soared to $36.5 million.

In this case, Mullen completed its listing as SPAC in November 2021.

After listing, Mullen's car-building routes gradually changed. In addition to passenger cars, Mullen began to think of commercial vehicles again.

In September 2022, Mullen suddenly announced that it would buy a 60 per cent majority stake in Bollinger Motors for $148.2 million in cash and stock.

Source: Bollinger MotrosBollinger Motros, a Michigan-based startup that produces all-electric commercial vehicles class 3 to 6, plans to produce Bollinger B1 and B2 off-road electric pickups.

In March this year, Mullen entered the domestic field of vision, and Future announced that it had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Mullen to jointly expand the American market. Mullen said that Mullen would assemble and sell the localized version of the Future K50 under the name of Mullen GT and Mullen GTRS.

In April 2022, short seller Hindenburg Research publicly shorted the company, saying that Mullen, from solid-state technology to prototypes to major customer orders, was fictional.

Source: Mullen started in February 2022, when Mullen released news that shocked the new energy industry that the company had made significant progress in solid-state batteries and commercialized it 18-24 months later, boosting the company's share price by 145%.

But in retrospect, QuantumScape, a solid-state battery technology developer invested by Volkswagen, has invested $1.2 billion in solid-state battery research and development, and even so, mass production will not be achieved until 2024-2025 at the earliest.

In 2021, Mullen spent only $3 million on research and development, which is obviously not credible.

In March 2022, the company's CEO announced that it would mass-produce two models of electric vans for a big customer in the coming months, and even released a prototype picture of the van on its website.

But Hindenburg Research found that the two prototype cars were actually electric minivans imported from China.

Source: Mullen not only that, short sellers also found that Mullen's $60 million purchase order was also untrue, and short sellers investigated that the so-called "big customer" Heights Dispensary, which signed 1200 electric vans with Mullen, actually operated a retail store in Texas.

In addition, Mullen's share price soared to $403 a share in July 2020 and received a $680000 contract from Washington.

The government will purchase an energy management module (EMM) from Mullen to provide battery life for electric vehicles, and Mullen claims to install the EMM on a truck to test, "showing that the range of 42 kWh lithium batteries has increased by more than 75 per cent".

Source: Mullen, the inventor of the so-called energy management module to improve the battery life of electric cars, Lawrence Hardge was convicted of fraud as early as 2001 and is a "convicted fraudster".

Later, Mullen broke up with Lawrence Hatch, and the big order came to nothing.

Throughout the development of Mullen, it is not difficult to find that it is very ambitious. You have to build cars, batteries, buy other companies, and even have a hand in energy management modules.

But the car-building plan, as the main business, is even more difficult to understand. at first, the goal of Mullen was to build passenger cars, but the "top zero-emission SUV" Mullen five has not yet been seen, and then began to build commercial vehicles, pick-up trucks, minivans and even trucks.

Source: many analysts at Mullen believe that Mullen is expanding too fast and has been expanding its team to recruit new employees and enter the international market when its financial situation does not allow it, which is "lost in expanding ambition".

With another delisting warning, time is running out for Mullen.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Superelectricity Lab (ID:SuperEV-Lab), author: Cao Tingting Chumen

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