Fisker’s Future Potentially In Jepoardy After Company Misses Q4 Production & Sales Targets

by Carl Malek | March 1, 2024

Tesla rival Fisker misses Q4 production and sales targets as the company also struggles to maintain cash reserves to survive through the remainder of 2024. The company is still optimistic that it can achieve strong growth through future investments.

Fisker is switching from direct sales to franchise dealer-based sales model to try and save costs

Sales of EVs are still trending upwards despite recent headwinds the segment is facing due to inflation and outside factors.

However, some of the companies making this current wave of EV models are not doing so well behind the scenes.

One of these firms is Fisker with the company confirming in its quarterly sales report that it not only missed its Q3 production and sales targets for the last half of 2023 but that the company is also being forced to do cost-cutting measures in an attempt to stay afloat throughout the remainder of 2024.

Fisker warns it might not have enough cash to remain in business

Fisker managed to increase its quarterly revenue to $200 million.

A prominent development that emerged out of the fourth quarter annual earnings report Fisker released this week is that the company might not be able to survive through 2024.

Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker announced that there was “substantial doubt about Fisker’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

This is reflected in the company’s earnings report which states that Fisker managed to increase its quarterly revenue to $200 million. This is an increase of $128.3 million when compared to the revenue the company reported for Q3 2023.

However, this initial glimmer of good news was balanced out by the massive $463 million loss that occurred in the same period, putting Fisker’s operating margin at -35%. These losses are prompting the company to make some cost-cutting moves to try and preserve capital, including laying off 15% of its workforce with the bulk of the layoffs coming from employees that were part of its axed direct sales arm.

Ocean SUV is creating a typhoon of trouble for Fisker

Fisker Ocean has faced several quality-related issues since entering production

Fisker’s only production vehicle at the moment is the Ocean SUV but while the company reported that it delivered its first Ocean to a customer last summer, the SUV has since faced strong headwinds.

Multiple owners have reported various quality issues with the SUV including loss of power while moving as well as the front hood of the SUV flying open at high speeds.

In addition to these aforementioned quality issues, Fisker has also had trouble ramping up Ocean production with the firm confirming in its report that it produced 4,879 Ocean SUVs in Q4 2023 with full-year production topping out at 10,193 units. Out of those, only half of them have been delivered to customers.

“2023 was a challenging year for Fisker, including delays with suppliers and other issues that prevented us from delivering the Ocean SUV as quickly as we had expected,” Chairman and CEO Henrik Fisker said.

Fisker is hoping to solve this problem by switching from the direct sales approach used by other EV makers to a model using franchise dealerships (Dealer Partners in Fisker speak) with the company claiming that it has added 12 dealerships in the United States and Europe since switching to franchise-based sales earlier this year.

Fisker is hoping that fresh infusions of capital will help it weather the financial storm

Fisker says that once the Dealer Partners model has more time to entrench itself, it could begin seeing some of the early benefits of this approach especially since franchise dealers will allow the company to sell more vehicles than it would’ve been able to do under a direct sales strategy.

Fisker Still Optimistic About Long-Term Growth

Despite some of the damaging figures in Fisker’s quarterly report, the company is still optimistic about achieving long-term growth.

Fisker says that it hopes to achieve combined sales of 20,000 to 22,000 units to consumers and dealerships with average sale prices being between $56,000 to $62,000 after dealer commission and import costs are factored in.

In addition, Fisker is continuing efforts to generate new capital with the company not only entering talks with an existing investor to inject more money into its coffers, but also entering key negotiations with an existing automaker to try and get them to invest in the company while also working on joint manufacturing projects, and collaboration on the development of future EV platforms. That did little to soothe the nerves of Wall Street with the company’s stock slipping to 0.4825 cents a share when trading closed for the day after the report was released.