00:00 Speaker A
Big three automaker Stellantis rising despite reporting a huge full-year loss. Yahoo Finance senior autos reporter Pras Subramanian has all the details. Pras, let’s start there. So, Stellantis, they post this loss, okay? But the stock jumps. So what what are investors responding and reacting to here?
00:18 Pras Subramanian
So we we already knew about that loss coming up because they warned about this massive 26 billion dollar write down on their EV business. Uh but today what we heard is that second half results getting better, right? You saw uh revenue up 10% for the second half of the year, uh an improvement there. That’s from the new CEO Antonio Felosa started in June. Uh, they did report a loss for that second half, but uh you’re seeing global shipments up too. potentially is a report that their partner Leap Motor, which is a Chinese EV maker, uh they’re going to be supposedly working with them on vehicles for Europe. So that was also seen as a bullish thing, I I think.
00:50 Speaker A
On EVs, now this was interesting. The CEO saying here, the company overestimated the pace of the energy transition. So, so what did they, what did they overestimate? What did they miscalculate? Was it, you know, demand, it was pricing, it was regulation? What was it?
01:03 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because they actually were so late to the game with the EVs. Their past CEO was sort of taking his time, but then they kind of invested a lot with, you know, multiple platforms for trucks. You know, they wanted to come with a with a full-sized truck pickup EV. They they cancelled that. Uh they also have a currently a kind of a bigger uh a bigger Jeep product that I don’t think is selling that well. Uh and they they discovered that smaller EVs are doing well in places like Europe but not in the US. So it’s a sort of retrenching of all that. And they noticed they didn’t have any hybrids, right? And that’s what people want. So a lot of that is write-downs of of not it’s not not all cash, right? It’s like write-downs of impairments of their of the platforms. There’s obviously some cash to pay for canceling contracts with suppliers, things like that. So that’s what hit them pretty pretty hard. But yeah, that’s what it is. It’s sort of Filosa is basically saying, ‘Hey, it wasn’t me. I just came in the job in June. I’m just trying to fix the fix the right correct the the the boat right now.’ Uh so that’s what’s happening now with all these write downs and sort of strategy changes.