Lotus in ‘a good place’ to go public, valued at $5.4b
After a series of terrible news coming from EV players Polestar and Renault’s Ampere, Lotus is feeling confident and ready to roll with listing its shares on Nasdaq by the end of March. The EV arm of the company is valued at $5.4 billion.
Automotive News Europe reports that the Geely-owned company is merging with “blank check” company L. Catteron Asia Acquisition in the first quarter, according to company head Mike Johnstone.
While its EV arm Lotus Tech was scheduled to be listed at the end of last year, that plan was delayed for “no specific reason,” according to Johnstone, who spoke with Automotive News Europe.
“We feel we are in a good place,” he said. “We delivered the volume of cars that we expected to, and we put in place a really pragmatic plan in terms of growth and gross margin.”
The timing of the listing comes right after Volvo stopped funding struggling luxury EV maker Polestar and handed full responsibility for the brand over to Geely, which is based in China. After Polestar was listed in the US in 2022, but it has continually struggled with poor stock performance and has had to rely on funding from Volvo and Geely for funding to stay in the game.
Also, French automaker Renault just canceled its planned IPO for its EV spinoff Ampere. While the IPO was scheduled for the first part of this year with an expected valuation of up to €10 billion ($10.47 billion), Renault says that market conditions aren’t optimal to make the move.
Adding to the grim mood, Volkswagen pushed back an IPO on its PowerCo. battery unit and plans to seek outside investors.
But Lotus says none of that will factor into their decision, with Johnstone saying that the brand’s high-end positioning puts them in a better place to ride out tough EV market conditions, said the report.
Lotus is aiming to reach 76,000 annual volume by 2025, and that’s based on sales of the Eletre SUV, Emeya sedan, and its Emira ICE sports car, at least that’s what the company said back in October. Lotus aims to go all-electric by 2028 once it replaces its Emira with an electric sports car (covered in-depth by Electrek) in 2027.
In 2026, the company also plans to release an electric SUV mysteriously dubbed Type 134 to rival the Porsche Macan. The brand expects to sell around 80,000 units of the Type 134 by 2027, which will be built in Wuhan, China, where Lotus builds its SUVs and sedans, reports Automotive News Europe.
Despite all the bad buzz in the media around electric vehicles at the moment, it won’t last, Johnstone said. The tide has already turned toward electric vehicles, and there is no going back. “You will see an increase in EV adoption driven by consumers and driven by regulators.”
Not that we’re not seeing some pushback on that. German automakers are stirring up news that Europe may push back its 2035 ban on ICE vehicles due to slow EV demand.
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China just connected its largest single-capacity solar farm built on a former coal mining area, which is in the Gobi Desert, to the grid.
The Mengxi Blue Ocean Photovoltaic Power Station, located in Otog Front Banner, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, came online on November 5. With a massive installed capacity of 3 gigawatts (GW) and over 5.9 million solar panels, the plant will generate around 5.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually – enough to power 2 million households.
This huge project will save about 1.71 million tons of standard coal each year and cut carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 4.7 million tons, which is equivalent to planting 62,700 hectares (around 155,000 acres) of trees.
Built on coal mining subsidence land, Mengxi Blue Ocean is part of China’s national West-East Electricity Transfer Project, which brings investment and development to western China west while supplying the growing need for electricity in the eastern provinces.
The solar farm includes the country’s first large-scale outdoor solar testing base in the Gobi Desert climate, demonstrating the potential for large solar installations in challenging environments.
The power station makes use of new rare earth alloy grounding materials, cutting costs by 40%. It also replaces traditional concrete foundations with steel to minimize impact on the local grassland ecosystem.
Chuang Xihong, deputy director of the Engineering Construction Department of Guodian Power Group, CHN Energy’s parent company, explained that Mengxi Blue Ocean is an agrivoltaic project as well [via PV Tech]:
Fine forage and sand-fixing plants are planted under the PV modules, providing grazing for Australian White Sheep and chickens. A composite ecological development model will be established where PV power generation and breeding will go hand in hand.
Read more: China powers up the world’s largest open-sea offshore solar farm
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