Lucid Motors to launch in China with Zhu Jiang

Lucid Motors is making moves to enter the Chinese market. The US electric car manufacturer has hired Zhu Jiang to head its business in China. Zhu Jiang previously worked for Nio, Ford and Jidu Motor, the electric car division of Baidu.

According to Reuters reports, citing an insider, Lucid initially wants to sell imported cars on the Chinese market, but is also considering production in China. No information is given on the specific timetable, but it is not likely to be a distant dream. According to the portal CNEVPost, Lucid already advertised 14 jobs on its website in December 2022, relating to various activities in Shanghai. Three of these posts were related to localisation, indicating that Lucid had started preparing to enter the Chinese market at that time.

Lucid launched deliveries of its Air electric luxury sedan in the US in late 2021. Europe followed at the end of 2022. The first units went to customers in Germany and the Netherlands at the time. The startup thus took its first steps into the global market in parallel.

This is also evidenced by the news that Lucid Motors has now also started deliveries of the Air in Saudi Arabia. This comes as little surprise: a few days ago, Lucid announced that it would raise fresh capital of around three billion US dollars by issuing shares. The majority of this comes from the main shareholder, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF).

A look at the current quarterly balance sheet shows how important the raising of the three billion dollars is for the company: at the end of March, Lucid Motors’ cash reserves were still at 900 million dollars. In Q1, sales had declined and the loss increased – probably also because of the price war for electric cars triggered by Tesla, but rising interest rates and fears of a recession are also considered possible reasons.

Expenditures, on the other hand, remain high – and not only because of the ambitious export strategy: with unit numbers rising more slowly than planned (Lucid had also lowered the production target for 2023), economies of scale are occurring late, and the company also has to spend a lot of money on final testing and production preparations for the Gravity electric SUV, which is to be launched on the market in 2024 as the second series car.

reuters.com, cnevpost.com (China), twitter.com (Saudi Arabia)