Yahoo Finance Polestar stock jumps as earnings, production forecast delight investors
Polestar (PSNY), the Swedish-based EV-maker backed by Volvo and Geely, is on a big roll.
The company issued strong fourth-quarter earnings, reporting a narrower loss than expected and revenue that jumped 84% from a year ago. And in a surprise for a pure-play EV-maker, the company exceeded its 50,000 annual production forecast, and now projects its 2023 production target will hit 80,000 units, a jump of 60%.
“Well, we had a very, very strong production run in the second half of '22, which then left it up to our countries to deliver these cars right to the last day in '22 in order to get really all the produced cars out,” Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
“And you can imagine we had a very, very happy Christmas party, knowing that we are delivering and making that distinction, being the EV startup that delivers on the targets and fulfills what we promised to do,” he added.
Indeed Polestar is doing what it promised to do, though calling the company a “startup” is a bit interesting for a company with the backing of Volvo and Geely. Polestar uses a joint Volvo/Geely facility in Zhejiang Province, China, to build the Polestar 2, the main vehicle it has on sale.
Ingenlath is confident in the company’s 80,000 production target, though he acknowledges “logistics and supply chain [are] not as optimum” as they were in years past. It’s easier for Polestar as they are only building one vehicle, but by the end of the year the company will have three products on sale, rounding out the portfolio.
“2023 is still a year where we are operating as a one-model company,” Ingenlath said, noting that 2023 is a transition year, with the Polestar 3 SUV coming soon. “We will, by the end of the year, have a product portfolio that has a range of three products, not only Polestar 3, but as well the Polestar 4 being there, joining and being launched this year.”
The Polestar 3 SUV, based on the same architecture as Volvo’s EX90 EV SUV, and the Polestar 4 Coupe SUV will round out Polestar’s product offerings by the end of 2023. The Polestar 5 sedan should be coming in 2024, along with the svelte Polestar roadster in 2026.
“It is for us now not a concern about launching and bringing these cars into production,” Ingenlath says. “Our asset-lite model that we are using, where we, indeed, work with the factories and the manufacturing teams that are established within Volvo and Geely, gives us that kind of comfort about, yeah, not ending up in production hell.”
Was that a dig at Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who experiences “production hell” when ramping up the Model 3?
Perhaps. Though the Swedish upstart is coming on strong, it has a long way to go before it can take it to the biggest player in the space.
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Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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