Shareholders of Lucid would probably like to forget the past six months even happened. The stock dropped 36.7% and now trades at $6.21. This was partly driven by its softer quarterly results and might have investors contemplating their next move.
Is there a buying opportunity in Lucid, or does it present a risk to your portfolio? See what our analysts have to say in our full research report, it’s free.
Why Is Lucid Not Exciting?
Even though the stock has become cheaper, we’re passing on Lucid for now. Here are three reasons you should be careful with LCID, plus one stock we’d rather own.
1. Low Gross Margin Reveals Weak Structural Profitability
Gross profit margin is a critical metric to track because it sheds light on its pricing power, complexity of products, and ability to procure raw materials, equipment, and labor.
Lucid has bad unit economics for an industrials business, signaling it operates in a competitive market. This is also because it’s an automobile manufacturer.
Automobile manufacturers have structurally lower profitability as they often break even on the initial sale of vehicles and instead make money on parts and servicing, which come many years later - this explains why new entrants whose fleets are too young to generate substantial aftermarket revenues have negative gross margins. As you can see below, these dynamics culminated in an average negative 133% gross margin for Lucid over the last five years.
2. Cash Burn Ignites Concerns
If you’ve followed StockStory for a while, you know we emphasize free cash flow. Why, you ask? We believe that in the end, cash is king, and you can’t use accounting profits to pay the bills.
Lucid’s demanding reinvestments have drained its resources over the last five years, putting it in a pinch and limiting its ability to return capital to investors. Its free cash flow margin averaged negative 420%, meaning it lit $420.12 of cash on fire for every $100 in revenue.
3. Short Cash Runway Exposes Shareholders to Potential Dilution
As long-term investors, the risk we care about most is the permanent loss of capital, which can happen when a company goes bankrupt or raises money from a disadvantaged position. This is separate from short-term stock price volatility, something we are much less bothered by.
Lucid burned through $5.11 billion of cash over the last year, and its $3.26 billion of debt exceeds the $761.3 million of cash on its balance sheet. This is a deal breaker for us because indebted loss-making companies spell trouble.
Unless the Lucid’s fundamentals change quickly, it might find itself in a position where it must raise capital from investors to continue operating. Whether that would be favorable is unclear because dilution is a headwind for shareholder returns.
We remain cautious of Lucid until it generates consistent free cash flow or any of its announced financing plans materialize on its balance sheet.
Final Judgment
Lucid’s business quality ultimately falls short of our standards. After the recent drawdown, the stock trades at $6.21 per share (or a forward price-to-sales ratio of 0.9×). The market typically values companies like Lucid based on their anticipated profits for the next 12 months, but it expects the business to lose money. We also think the upside isn’t great compared to the potential downside here - there are more exciting stocks to buy. We’d recommend looking at a dominant aerospace business that has perfected its M&A strategy.
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