XPeng founder and Chairman He Xiaopeng has seen his company leapfrog both Ferrari and BMW to become … [+]
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Yesterday the world’s ninth biggest automaker was BMW, which sells more than two million cars a year, followed by Ferrari.
Today, it’s a Chinese electric vehicle brand called XPeng that has rarely sold more than 4000 cars a month.
Stocks in electric-vehicle makers are surging, with some leaping beyond 150 percent in just a month.
From Tesla
TSLA
Out of 15 pure EV shares we checked, 14 are up significantly this week (the exception is Fisker, which is still up for the month) and six of them have hit 52-week highs.
They’ve gained more in the past week alone than the market capitalizations of GM and Ford combined.
What’s remarkable about the EV surge is that it isn’t an EV surge at all. It’s an exclusively new EV surge.
It also isn’t new. They were surging earlier this year before Covid-19 set them on their heels, and now they’re surging again.
It hasn’t taken long, for example, for Volkswagen’s ID.3 EV hatchback to blow by Tesla’s monthly sales rate in Europe, but there’s barely been a wobble of the needle for the German brand’s stock
Renault sold 8.1 million cars last year and is a major EV player thanks to its Zoe and its Alliance with Nissan. On October 28 this year, XPeng traded at $19 a share. Today it traded at $63.09 a share.
XPeng added three Renaults to its market capitalization yesterday, despite Renault selling 22 more vehicles than every “new” EV in the world combined, including Tesla. Remove Tesla and Renault sells more than 200 times the combined volumes of the new EV stocks.
It’s not stopping there, either, with XPeng taking aim at Tesla over CEO Elon Musk’s repeated accusations of intellectual property theft, and Musk’s snarky reaction to XPeng fitting its new models with LiDar to aid assisted-driving technologies.
XPeng CEO He Xiaoping told a Chinese social media site that his company would not be bullied by Tesla and Musk and that the company would “beat you (Musk) out of your mind”.
“It seems that Xiaopeng next generation autonomous driving architecture that we unveiled yesterday, which includes LiDar, has upset someone in the west,” Xiaoping wrote, aiming at Musk.
“What I’m trying to say is that rumor-mongering has long proved impossible to beat any competitor. From next year, self-driving in China, you should be prepared for us to beat you out of your mind. As for international, we will meet each other.”
Meanwhile, the legacy brands continue to plug away, using old-fashioned metrics like receivables and profits to generate incremental market cap growth.
Renault, like every carmaker, dropped as Covid-19 smashed the industry around the world, falling from its 2020 highs of €44.47 in January to €12.77 in March before clamoring to €34.38 yesterday.
Volkswagen fell from €109.11 to €60.20 and yesterday eked its way back up to €107.67.
