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Rivian, the US electric carmaker, said on December 12th that it would suspend plans for a joint venture with Mercedes-Benz Commercial vehicle (Mercedes-Benz Vans). Rivian said it would give priority to its current consumer product development roadmap and manufacturing capacity expansion as well as its commercial business. Claire McDonough, the company's chief financial officer, said in a statement that the suspension of the cooperation was based on current and expected economic conditions.

On Sept. 8, local time, Mercedes-Benz Commercial vehicle (Mercedes-Benz Vans) and Rivian announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to launch a strategic partnership. According to the announcement, the two sides will set up a joint venture to produce electric trucks in Europe in the future. The two companies hope to make use of shared investment, cost sharing and operational synergies to rapidly expand the production scale of electric trucks. It is understood that the two sides are considering investing in an existing Mercedes-Benz plant in Central or Eastern Europe to build a new pure electric production facility.

For Rivian, the partnership with Mercedes-Benz will help it save cash and money for its second plant in the United States, which it plans to build in 2025, while helping it rapidly expand production. However, the partnership fell apart only in March. Mercedes-Benz Vans said in a statement that Rivian would no longer implement the memorandum of understanding signed with it in September, including plans to invest in and jointly operate Mercedes's existing van plant.

Data show that Rivian was founded in 2009, headquartered in Irvine, California, was originally an American Mainstream Motors car manufacturer specializing in the development of sports cars, in 2010, the founder renamed Mainstream Motors to Rivian, and transferred from sports cars to pure electric pickups. At the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show, Rivian launched pure electric pickup truck R1T and pure electric SUV R1S, in which pure electric pickup truck R1T was widely favored and invested by Ford, Amazon and other well-known companies. Bezos also personally promoted it, which is also the incentive to promote its skyrocketing share price.

In the American market, pickups are much more popular than cars and SUV. According to 2021 data, the top three car sales in the United States are Ford F-Series, Dodge RAM and Chevrolet Solode. all three models are pickups, with sales of 726000, 569000 and 530000 respectively, while Toyota's RAV4 ranks fourth with 408000. At the same time, under the wave of new energy vehicles, electric pick-up trucks have also become the tipping point of the American car market, such as GM's GMC Hummer EV, Ford's Fmur150 Lightning, Tesla's Cybertruck and so on. From this point of view, Rivian took the lead in the launch of pure electric pickup truck R1T seems to be in the forefront of the market.

On November 1, 2021, Rivian was listed on NASDAQ with an offering price of $78. It rose to $119.46 in intraday trading and closed at $100.73, with a total market capitalization of $85.9 billion. On the same day, founder RJ Scaringe revealed in an interview that Rivian must grow rapidly to produce at least 1 million electric vehicles a year by 2030. Rivian's long-term plan is to build four assembly plants around the world, with a second plant in the United States in addition to the existing one in Normal, Illinois, and one in Europe and one in China.

Since then, Rivian's share price has soared, from $100.73 on November 1 to $172.01 on November 16, with its market capitalization rising from $85.9 billion on November 1 to $149.4 billion on November 16. As of November 16, Rivian's market capitalization is second only to Tesla's US $1.0592 trillion and Toyota's US $261.8 billion, surpassing Volkswagen and BMW to become the third car company in the world by market capitalization. However, since November 16, Rivian shares have continued to plummet, falling to $25.61 a share in the previous session, while Ford had no choice but to sell its stake and leave at a loss as results and prospects came under pressure.

On Nov. 10, Rivian released its third-quarter financial results, showing that Rivian had revenues of $536 million and a net loss of $1.72 billion in the third quarter of 2022. By the end of Q3, the cumulative loss of Rivian had reached $5 billion. According to the financial report, Rivian production in the third quarter of 2022 was 7363 vehicles and delivery volume was 6584 vehicles. However, total Rivian production in the first three quarters was 14317 vehicles and total delivery volume was 12278 vehicles, a far cry from the delivery target of 25000 vehicles.

For Rivian, the only difficulty at this stage may be capacity. After all, unlike Arrival, which is in financial trouble, and Lucid,Rivian, which is facing falling orders, demand has always been strong. According to the latest data, the number of orders for Rivian has increased from 98000 at the end of Q2 to 114000, and the order figure does not include the 100000 orders Rivian received from shareholder Amazon.

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