Q3-23 Spin city

@silvernort I am with you on this dilemma; I just got the purchase order yesterday to pay up and delivery is set on 24th. BUT....now I am bit hesitant. I also have sizable shares in the company....not a fun decision.

@silvernort Overpromised-under delivered, Q3 release fiasco, improper delivery planning and 'double-speak' are their own fault. There is no way to spin Q3. It is now in the past. There are ~48 days to 31st Dec 2023. They have ~1,300 employees now. Improvement is needed in all aspects of the business!

They should stop talking, especially HF, and get to work on delivering excellent Q4 results.

@silvernort totally agree that retaining previous orders and finding new customers is going to be key in the path forward.

This will be no easy feat as many Americans won't even consider an automotive brand they haven't heard of-- let alone for 60-70k. (And even some of the ones they HAVE heard of they won't test drive despite being statistically higher in reliability than a Ford or Jeep for example)

Fisker has limited to almost zero brand recognition to the masses. I have yet to meet anyone outside of this group or Fisker events that knew what this car was or it's existence.

I would say that besides enthusiasts and/or those with FOO who don't want to lose $5,000 (and have extra disposable income) have kept the Ocean's momentum to this point.

Along the way though many Fisker hopefuls or semi-enthusiasts (myself included) have canceled for now with this much uncertainty and overall poor buying/delivery/quality control experiences reported the last few months.

Taking the wait and see approach seems safer. Personally, I figured it's better to be out $300 than (to your point) potentially having a $70,000 🧱 in the driveway in 2024. I just don't have that type of extra funds to take on that kind  of risk. I need a car that is ready to drive and does so reliably when I get in it 99.9% of the time. Period. 

I do hope we see a 180° with Fisker's leadership and business operations in the coming months but I am pretty sure after today most of us here are down 80% or more in our investments in FSR. The excuse of being a startup does not compensate for the severity of delivery issues and missed promises this companies executive team has demonstrated since FO deposits were taken in 2022. 

In summary-- today's headlines re: Fisker are not extremely promising to attract new buyers that already haven't heard of the brand before. And those of us in the wait and see bucket have an ever growing list of EV's eager to gain our business from companies with customer service teams that do know how to respond to an email..  with doors that reliably unlock via key fob (in 2023!!!) and 12v batteries that stay charged in their first 30 days of ownership.... etc etc etc. 

IMHO at least one of them, Henrik Fisker or Geeta Fisker, needs to step down. The market has zero trust in anything Henrik or Geeta Fisker say. Really zero trust, because they have broken every promise and missed every business target. Again and again and again. Supply chain, deliveries, service, accounting, ...: They failed with everything. They had to lower the production target for 2023 3 times in just 6 months. Unbelievable. They have obviously no clue what's going on in their company and how to run a car production. And now it's even official, because they had officially to admit "material weaknesses in the company's internal control over financial reporting".

Instead of fixing his company, Henrik Fisker spends his time delivering some cars himself, assisting with test drives and drawing sketches for customers. As if that would save Fisker Inc. It's really absurd. He should work to fix broken or missing structures at Fisker Inc.

Henrik Fisker and Geeta Fisker can't win back trust in the next few weeks. But they need trust in the next few weeks, because Fisker needs to find suppliers and an assembly company for the PEAR and Alaska and to scale up the Ocean production. In the next weeks! Otherwise PEAR and Alaska will also be delayed again. But if you have assembly capacity, you will not be interested in setting up production lines for the PEAR if you witness the ongoing management disaster at Fisker. Fisker needs new trustworthy faces in the management, to regain some of the needed trust in the short term.

The share price is in ruins. Fisker will probably not get any new financing (beside the 550 mio. from an old contract). If they fail to increase production of the Ocean and fail to start production of the PEAR in early 2025, then Fisker will be history. It is completely impossible to be competitive as a car manufacturer with just 20,000 cars per year or so.

At least the rest of my portfolio is up a ton today, trimmed some MSFT/AAPL type names at highs to make room for a little more FSR.  Doesn't take that many dollars to really bring average down now.  Average now $5.53.

Fisker is either going to be a $0 or a $10+ within a year, position size accordingly.

Target misses and lower projection. For next quarter, already generated ~$140M revenue based on delivery so far but operating and production costs will also be up. Still like the car, but not the stock - Can be a great buying opportunity now if Fisker can improve and surprise, or burst.

@duicui yea, they can't afford to build out much more in inventory than they have in the pipeline currently.  Could be why a lot of the recently finished VINs (mine included) are sitting at Magna.  I believe they have to pay Magna once they take it off their Austrian facilities.  Probably want to ensure they can get throughput without any logistical bottlenecks before they get to taking 200-300 Oceans/day from Magna.

Henrik and Geeta have been really good at self-goals! Henrik is a good designer and Geeta is good at financial engineering but they are clearly inept at running a car company. Investors have little faith in anything they say and customers are tired of  their missteps.

Listening to the earnings call yesterday was being in an amateur hour at best ..

1. Had plenty of time to plan logistics and deliveries. The plan to open centers around US was the right way to go. They knew exactly where their customers were located … 5000 One customers were known in July 2022!

2. Geeta said she was surprised to learn from customer survey that people would much prefer to pickup from a center or pop-up event where they can meet Fisker techs. This as opposed to having a random driver drop off the car at home without any orientation and left to deal with all sorts of issues. Seriously??? That was a revelation to you as the COO???

3. ADESA handles cars that go through auctions. Before they picked them as the processing facility, did anyone check out if they had fast chargers? Why was that a surprise? Again, makes the case for having own delivery centers

4. Anyone with the least bit of knowledge of car logistics knows that closed trailers are very limited in supply. And the ones being hauled by pickup trucks are not meant for hauling heavy EVs. No wonder they can’t fine drivers to pickup their cars for delivery. Should have planned for regular car carriers to transport the vehicles for customer delivery. BSB Matte paint FOO could have been prioritized for trailer delivery or pickup from a center or pop-up location.

5. They didn’t say a peep about this but the elephant in the room is all the issues with software and the car itself that owners are left to deal with. What was the plan for mobile technicians?? This is a huge ding on customer satisfaction and any word-of-mouth referrals. I understand the start-up phase difficulties but they clearly are flailing at this. To make matters worse, they are clearly not inspecting cars properly at the processing facility before it goes out the door for customer delivery. I have one with a broken AC. Hardware issues are expensive to fix when you have to fly a technician out to the customer. Much better to deal with it at the processing facility.

6. Magna can scale manufacturing, customers have paid, waiting and getting angry. Find a competent COO who knows how to run logistics, delivery, centers and service. Stop making bogus promises.

i would like to see Fisker succeed but they need to stop making self-goals or it’ll be over soon!

@oceanone714 I could not have said it any better..... very well put! I'm sure both of them want the company to succeed. But these kind of excuses are amateurish and sound dumb. They are ruining a good product with their inept handling of the operations to be honest.

@oceanone714 

The most baffling about this is that the volume of cars is a lot less than Q1 and Q2 projections.

It smelled really fishy in Norway where they the had just a handfull employees by late spring and resignment notice in Norway is not two weeks like in the US, but three MONTHS. Where would they get qualified employees from? The job listings were fresh and active at that time.
That made it clear to me they had no real intention of actually delivering any substantial amount of cars anytime soon and made me so skeptical that I just cancelled the One. 

This dishonesty was not something I needed in my life. Now I am more like voyeur with a sliver of hope that they make up their mind if they will do feature subscriptions on not on the Ultra. If they do, I'm out for good. We GenX'ers do not pay rent on stuff we bought. 

Posted by: @oceanone714

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They didn’t say a peep about this but the elephant in the room is all the issues with software

I find the sudden lack of reporting on reservation and order numbers an even larger elephant (and that would need to be a big one). 

In Norway we have a delivery organization proven capable of delivering 200 cars in Aug/Sept. How come they only have delivered 60 in Oct/Nov so far? And probably the numbers are actually less, since there has been a lot of very late cancellations and returns, making the same cars probably count twice on the registrations stats. 

@dsf they are not reporting reservations because there have been lots of cancellations I suspect. One owners made a large deposit so they are going through with it. Extreme prices were cut while Ultra and Sport priced were increased. I find it interesting that they opened so many centers in Europe and hardly any in US. Going by what I see on FB and forums, there are likely far more reservations in US than Europe. Or maybe, Henrik thought he could sell more in Europe. In any case, they are now delivering Extreme, Ultra, Sport in EU from what I heard on the earnings call. Demand is softening and these mess-ups don’t engender customer confidence.

With mess they have created in US, there is a strong risk of a class action lawsuit being filed in US. All you need is a rich pi**ed off lawyer and it’s game over.

@fisker-brat agree 100%. Between the two of them, they own 50% of stock so it’s also a form of self-harm.

@oceanone714 -- this 100%

I bet the number of orders that churned grew faster than the new customer acquisition rate in Q3. No one wants to share data around this point when things aren't looking so sexy...