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Month: February 2022

Putting EV Valuations Into Perspective

by Marcus Lu
This post is by Marcus Lu from Visual Capitalist

EV Valuations

Putting EV Valuations Into Perspective

The global push for lower emissions has created a mania around pure-electric automakers. While Tesla leads the charge, institutional investors have also piled into many of its younger rivals.

For example, in 2019, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $1.3 billion into Lucid Motors. One year later, it was revealed that Amazon had a 20% stake (worth $3.8B) in Rivian.

To see how quickly EV valuations have ballooned, we’ve visualized the historical market capitalizations (market caps) of 10 prominent automakers.

Legacy vs Pure-Electric

The legacy group includes five top traditional automakers, while the EV group includes the five most valuable pure-electric automakers that are listed on an American exchange.

The following table lists the market caps of these companies at various dates. While XPeng and NIO are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, they do not currently sell cars in the U.S.

AutomakerType20102015202102/22/2022
?? TeslaEV$3B$31B$1,061B$849B
?? ToyotaLegacy$124B$191B$255B$256B
?? Volkswagen GroupLegacy$59B$79B$129B$128B
?? Mercedes-BenzLegacy$61B$94B$83B$89B
?? FordLegacy$63B$57B$83B$69B
?? General MotorsLegacy$55B$51B$85B$68B
?? RivianEVN/AN/A$93B$55B
?? LucidEVN/AN/A$63B$42B
?? NIOEVN/AN/A$50B$35B
?? XpengEVN/AN/A$41B$30B

Source: Companies Market Cap

At the end of 2021, Tesla and its four EV rivals were worth a combined $1.3 trillion. This was more than double of the legacy group, which (Read more...)

Putting EV Valuations Into Perspective

by Marcus Lu
This post is by Marcus Lu from Visual Capitalist

EV Valuations

Putting EV Valuations Into Perspective

The global push for lower emissions has created a mania around pure-electric automakers. While Tesla leads the charge, institutional investors have also piled into many of its younger rivals.

For example, in 2019, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $1.3 billion into Lucid Motors. One year later, it was revealed that Amazon had a 20% stake (worth $3.8B) in Rivian.

To see how quickly EV valuations have ballooned, we’ve visualized the historical market capitalizations (market caps) of 10 prominent automakers.

Legacy vs Pure-Electric

The legacy group includes five top traditional automakers, while the EV group includes the five most valuable pure-electric automakers that are listed on an American exchange.

The following table lists the market caps of these companies at various dates. While XPeng and NIO are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, they do not currently sell cars in the U.S.

AutomakerType20102015202102/22/2022
?? TeslaEV$3B$31B$1,061B$849B
?? ToyotaLegacy$124B$191B$255B$256B
?? Volkswagen GroupLegacy$59B$79B$129B$128B
?? Mercedes-BenzLegacy$61B$94B$83B$89B
?? FordLegacy$63B$57B$83B$69B
?? General MotorsLegacy$55B$51B$85B$68B
?? RivianEVN/AN/A$93B$55B
?? LucidEVN/AN/A$63B$42B
?? NIOEVN/AN/A$50B$35B
?? XpengEVN/AN/A$41B$30B

Source: Companies Market Cap

At the end of 2021, Tesla and its four EV rivals were worth a combined $1.3 trillion. This was more than double of the legacy group, which (Read more...)

Halio’s Hadar Zeitlin on Building an AI Company from the Ground Up

by Ayzia Vizcocho
This post is by Ayzia Vizcocho from Blog – Crunchbase

The Crunchbase “Female Leader Series” is comprised of stories, Q&As and thought-leadership pieces from glass-ceiling-smashers who overcame the odds and are now leading successful companies.

Hadar Zeitlin is co-founder and chief business officer of Hailo, an artificial intelligence chipmaker powering smart devices at the edge and innovating industries including automotive, smart cities, smart homes, smart retail, industry 4.0 and beyond.

Zeitlin brings with her a decade of technology experience from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) elite technology unit, where she served as chief architect and led the unit’s flagship R&D project, which was ultimately recognized with the General Chief of Staff Award for Technological Excellence. Before founding Halio, she served as the first product manager at Via Transportation—a dominant player in the shared mobility market—where she was responsible for multiple core projects including the overseeing of algorithms and the development of products, both backend and frontend. 

In this Q&A, Zeitlin shares lessons she learned from building her company from the ground up and the role she played in securing the largest funding round in the edge AI chip space to date.

Q: What is your advice for other female founders at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journeys?

Building a company from the ground up can be daunting. It’s super important to acknowledge that your job will be extremely demanding, keeping you busy both physically and mentally around the clock. To pretend otherwise is only going to guarantee burnout in the long run—and that, in turn, increases the (Read more...)

Mapped: EV Battery Manufacturing Capacity, by Region

by Sponsored Content

The following content is sponsored by Scotch Creek Ventures.

Mapped: EV Battery Manufacturing Capacity, by Region

The demand for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) is rising rapidly—it’s set to reach 9,300 gigawatt-hours (GWh) by 2030—up by over 1,600% from 2020 levels.

For that reason, developing domestic battery supply chains, including battery manufacturing capacity, is becoming increasingly important as countries strive to shift away from gasoline vehicles to EVs.

Which countries are leading the race for batteries? The above infographic from Scotch Creek Ventures highlights the top 10 nations for EV battery manufacturing.

The Top 10 Countries by Capacity

The biggest battery manufacturers are located in regions that have high demand for EVs, and that have wide access to raw materials:

RankCountry2021 Li-ion manufacturing capacity (GWh)% of World Total
#1China ??55879.0%
#2U.S. ??446.2%
#3Hungary ??284.0%
#4Poland ??223.1%
#5South Korea ??182.5%
#6Japan ??172.4%
#7Germany ??111.6%
#8Sweden ??40.6%
#9UK ??20.3%
#10Australia ??10.1%
N/ARest of the World ?10.1%
N/ATotal706100.0%

Data as of February 1, 2021.
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence

China is by far the leader in the battery race with nearly 80% of global Li-ion manufacturing capacity. The country also dominates other parts of the battery supply chain, including the mining and refining of battery minerals like lithium and graphite.

The U.S. is following China from afar, with around 6% or 44 GWh (Read more...)

Associate – DCVC

by Jennifer Zemel

At DCVC, we support entrepreneurs who will unlock the next wave of foundational innovation, whether in biology, technology, agriculture or space. We do so with optimism, technical and operating expertise, and relentless curiosity.

Through years of technology innovation, society has created massive prosperity but has yet to eradicate diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer, transform massive industries to reduce inequality, or materially slow–let alone reverse–climate change. In addition to these pressing long-term challenges, humanity is ill-prepared to be resilient in moments of immediate crises like natural disasters or global pandemics.

Associate
As we embark on our next phase of growth, we are looking to add an Associate to join our investment team. We are seeking someone who will assist in all aspects of DCVC’s investment process and have a broad range of meaningful responsibilities across the organization. This role is based in Palo Alto, CA.

Responsibilities

  • Build portfolio company financial models: income statement projections, balance sheet projections including capital expenditure modeling via debt and equity financing structures and analysis of cost of capital for financing options.
  • Extensive capitalization table modeling
  • Market research including modeling of total addressable market size for portfolio company’s products.
  • Key member of deal team that will assist in the evaluation of potential investments through founder and financial due diligence, market research, competitive analysis and drafting of Investment Memorandum that will incorporate market analysis, due diligence findings and financial models.
  • Coordinate with portfolio companies for periodic reporting and conduct financial analyses to inform DCVC portfolio management and reporting (Read more...)

Sartre on Trolls

by Unknown

Josh Marshall shares this extraordinarily sharp passage from John-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, which seems to capture the essence of trolling. Trolls understand the asymmetry of reasonableness. They understand that when your opponents feel constrained by the need to engage seriously and responsibly, the willingness to be ridiculous and offensive can provide a great advantage.  

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” 

Momentum Monday – Seeds and 17 Sigma

by Howard Lindzon
This post is by Howard Lindzon from Howard Lindzon

Good Monday morning everyone.

Monday’s mean ‘Momentum Monday’ and while it has not been fun to be ‘Howie’ in a market that hates growth since December , the show must go on. Also, being Howie is relative and my heart goes out to the people of Ukraine suffering while I surf the internet. I am a fortunate man.

This week’s tour of the markets like always is sponsored by my friends at Marketsmith. You can watch/listen to the show right here on Youtube. I have embedded it below here on the blog:

As a reminder, Marketsmith (by Investor’s Business Daily) is now a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from Marketsmith. They are offering my readers a three week trial for $19.95. Click this link if you would like to try it out.

For me, the cash sidelines for 30-60 percent of my stock exposure feels about right (I will aggressively swing trade once in a while). I am happier to pay up for ‘growth’ stocks when software/technology companies start trending again.

Any extra market time the last month has goner into watching the stocks on the Stocktwits momentum 25 lists. They have been bursting with energy, metals and financial stocks for months.

Ivanhoff and the rest of the swing traders moved to these as did investors and traders that follow price momentum.

JC has a great chart that sums up the strength (Read more...)

No, Mr. Baquet, that wasn’t what happened. We were there. We took notes.

by Unknown

Following up from last week's post. 

Dean Baquet speaking to the New Yorker. 

If I had to do that over again, oh, my God, I would do that very, very, very differently. I mean, we treated Trump seriously. We treated him as an investigative story. But I would have covered the country a lot differently in the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump.

The revisionism here is truly stunning. The NYT was widely criticized at the time for downplaying or ignoring entirely numerous Trump scandals (particularly compared to the Washington Post) while spending the majority of their time and energy on Clinton scandals, almost none of which really panned out. 

Charles Pierce described this as a war between the NYT and the Post. Baquet would now like you believe they were on the same side all along but we know better.

Because, like I said, we took notes. 


Wednesday, September 21, 2016

"Why do you hate us for caring too much?" – – Dispatches from a besieged institution

Public Editor
From Wikipedia

The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public. They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a possibility for bias. However, (Read more...)