Lucid Q&A Q3 2021: planning on 500,000 units

Q&A is a session under a company's earnings conference that institutional and retailinvestors ask some most-concerned questions to the management. On this page, you may find out some valuable info that might affect the stock price in the following weeks. $Lucid Group (LCID.US)$

Key Takeaways:

Attitudes: themanagement feels like sitting in a terrific place today with a $4.8 billion.

Goals: Laser focused on growing the scale towards 20,000 units next year. But we're planning on 500,000 units by the end of the decade.

Products: the SUV Gravity is ready for production late '23.

Congrats on your first quarter as a public Company. 90,000 units capacity by 2023 seems a little bit pedestrian, right? As you think about your volume, if you could tell us where you're headed?

Laser focused on growing the scale towards 20,000 units next year. But we're planning on 500,000 units by the end of the decade. We have a plan in place to expand Casa Grande to that level. And we've also got localization of manufacturing. We've got incredible high value in our manufacturing as well because we manufacture the entire technology suite, the battery, the motor, the inverter, the whole electric powertrain, in-house. So we're not just buying in parts here and just having value that way. There's a whole lot of in-built value-add to the cars that we've got. But of course, we also plan probes in other parts of the world, the Middle East and in China, and this is going to be part of our global expansion plan.

Would you consider a greater issuance to raise capital, to maybe accelerate this 90,000 units capacity in 2023. And hopefully maybe grow even faster than what you've been talking about.

We're sitting in a terrific place today with a $4.8 billion as of September 30th. That can get us well through 2022. You're going to see a large CapEx increase happening next year. So we're already doing that acceleration. And in June, we announced that we were going to be bringing forward $350 million of planned CapEx investments from future periods into the 2021 to 2023 periods, and also increasing overall between 2021 and 2026 by 6% to 7%. So we are going to accelerate in our ability to deploy CapEx. And if the opportunity presents itself -- you might recall that our prior versions of our motto suggested that, 2024 and beyond that we might start to step down our CapEx but then opportunity is there for continued expansion and we are ready for it. We will certainly go after it.

You have a knockout products with best-in-class range. How do you view gravities differentiation in the market?

We've made a whole bunch of advances with Gravity project. It's very close to my heart. We're getting it ready for production late '23 and I think it's going to be equally as disruptive in the SUV space as Air is in its sedan space. We're going to deploy the space concept, miniaturization of the electric car train, incredible range for its class, and it's going to have 1 or 2 really big dialing, unique features as well. I am super excited about Gravity.

Congrats on the MotorTrend Car of the Year Award. I had a question on the delta of reservations from the 13 at the end of the quarter to the over 17 now. So I'd be curious what the like-for-like is of North American reservations within that delta? Then maybe within international, how much of a Saudi versus non Saudi or any color that would be helpful?

We don't international reservations before we announce the 13,000, also, the bulk of reservations is our home markets, U.S. and we haven't even opened up the big market and teacher, which is China. But absolutely Saudi is great because it's our biggest market number of reservations, and that's really heartening that the country which is gained its wealth based upon its carbon economy is so forward-looking and sees the efforts in corrective product.

On your distribution strategy, can you remind us why the advantages of going direct to consumer and why you are not using a franchise model?

The important thing here is that we are creating a new brand. It's not just about the product. The product defines the brand, but there's more here than just Lucid Air and a luxury brand. And the consumer experience in the consumer journey is too precious to delegate to third-party. We need to choreograph the consumer's journey through discovery, through intrigue, through purchase and ownership, and how better than to do it directly. You can also just driving consistency in messaging as well, you're not working with independent franchises and dealerships that it just really allows a lot more control

This article is a script from the Q&A session of Lucid's earnings call on Nov 16. In order to facilitate reading, we have made appropriate cuts. If you want to know more details, you can click here to re-watch the earnings call.

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