Technology

Siemens Energy shares plunge more than 30% as wind turbine worries deepen

Published

2 years ago

June 23, 2023

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Siemens Energy shares plunged 31% on Friday morning after the company scrapped its profit forecast.

Wolfgang Rattay | Reuters

Siemens Energy shares plunged on Friday after the company scrapped its profit forecast and warned that costly problems at its wind turbine unit could last for years.

The stock price was last seen down 36% during afternoon deals.

The company, born from the spinoff of the former gas and power division of German conglomerate Siemens, announced late Thursday that a review of issues at subsidiary Siemens Gamesa had found a “substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components.”

The Siemens Gamesa board has initiated an “extended technical review” aimed at improving product quality that the parent company said will incur “significantly higher costs” than previously assumed, now estimated to be in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion).

“It is too early to have an exact estimate of the potential financial impact of the quality topics and to gauge the impact of the review of our assumptions on our business plans,” Siemens Energy said in a statement.

“However, based on our initial assessment as of today, the potential magnitude of the impact leads us to withdraw the profit assumptions for Siemens Gamesa and consequently the profit guidance for Siemens Energy Group for fiscal year 2023.”

Siemens Gamesa has been a thorn in the side of its parent company since its full takeover late last year.

Siemens Energy share price

Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch told journalists on a call Friday that “too much had been swept under the carpet” at Siemens Gamesa and that the quality issues were “more severe than [he] thought possible,” according to Reuters.

Nicholas Green, head of European capital goods at Alliance Bernstein, said Siemens Energy would likely be able to climb back from the fall, but the scale of the problems had shocked the market.

“There’s a 17 billion euros service order book and that is delivering service on installed wind farms and in wind turbines for quite a number of years ahead — five years ahead, sometimes 10-year contracts — and to discover that a handful of your components aren’t working as you planned, that maybe you’ll need to go in and replace those components, that is a very large liability that you’re taking on,” he said.

Siemens Energy estimates that component failures may be occurring in between 15% and 30% of its installed fleet of turbines, but Green noted that there is still a “slight question mark about where that liability ends.”

“With luck, when they report back at the beginning of August, they will have managed to put some sort of brackets around the scale of the cost here and the scale of the obligations ahead of them, but certainly it is an alarmingly large hit and it’s taken the market by surprise,” he said.

Technology

Autonomous EV trucking company Einride going public in SPAC deal valuing it at $1.8 billion

Published

3 hours ago

November 12, 2025

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Autonomous EV trucking company Einride going public in SPAC deal valuing it at .8 billion

Autonomous EV freight trucking company Einride is planning to go public on the New York Stock Exchange through a SPAC deal with Legato Merger Corp. III, a blank check company, valuing it at $1.8 billion.

The deal is expected to raise $219 million in gross proceeds, with up to an additional $100 million in PIPE capital from institutional investors, with Einride to begin trading during the first half of 2026.

In announcing its plans, the Stockholm, Sweden-based company reported a contracted annual recurring revenue base of $65 million and over $800 million in potential long-term ARR.

Founded in 2016, Einride has over 25 customers across seven countries, and regulatory permits in the United States and Europe. Its current fleet of approximately 200 electric vehicles is used by customers including GE Appliances and Swedish online pharmacy company Apotea.

“Today marks a defining moment for Einride and for the future of freight technology,” said
Roozbeh Charli, CEO of Einride, in a release. “We’ve proven the technology, built trust with global customers, and shown that autonomous and electric operations are not just possible, but better. This transaction positions us to accelerate our global expansion and continue to deliver with speed and precision for our customers,” said Charli, who took over the CEO post from co-founder and previous CEO Robert Falck last May.

Einride has made the CNBC Disruptor 50 list for three consecutive years, ranking No. 24 in 2025.

Freight trucking in the U.S. and elsewhere, estimated by Einride at a $4.6 trillion market, is both carbon-intensive and inefficient. Einride’s technology is designed to reduce emissions at scale and prove electric freight is viable both technologically and economically.

PepsiCo is among the companies that has been piloted use of Einride freight solutions, in markets including Memphis, Tennessee, and in Germany. Heineken added EV freight routes between the Netherlands and Germany in 2024, and to Austria this year. Einride also has plans to deploy 300 electric trucks across Europe by 2030 with Mars.

To date, Einride provides freight services for both driver-operated electric trucks and heavy-duty autonomous EV trucks. Its technology can be licensed to third parties, both operational planning AI software and its autonomous driving system.

In May of last year, Einride signed a deal with DP World to deploy the largest autonomous EV fleet in the Middle East, at the major UAE port, Jebel Ali, one of the world’s largest shipping points.

While many of its deals to date are for EV and not autonomous technology, in the U.S. it marked a year of autonomous operations with GE Appliances in 2024, and began autonomous freight shipments with Swedish online pharmacy company Apotea, Europe’s first daily autonomous freight trips.

The U.S. is the company’s second-largest market and it plans to continue to invest in the country to accelerate deployment of its autonomous systems. In all, Einride reports over 1,700 driverless hours in contracted customer operations, over 11 million electric miles driven, and over 350,000 executed shipments.

“This transaction with Einride aligns with our vision to bring industry-leading, innovative technology to the public markets,” said Eric Rosenfeld, chief SPAC officer of Legato, in the release. “Einride’s proven customer relationships, regulatory achievements, and technology platform position the Company to be a leader in the transformation of the freight industry.”

It competes with autonomous trucking companies including Aurora Innovation and fellow Disruptor Waabi, which recently hired Uber Freight CEO and founder Lior Ron as its chief operating officer.

According to data from Matthew Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of pre-IPO research and IPO-focused ETFs, Legato Merger III raised $175 million in its February 2024 IPO ($201 million including a deal overallotment). The management term’s prior two SPACs produced Algoma Steel, a Canada-based steel producer that closed its merger with Legato I in October 2021, and Southland Holdings, an engineering and construction company that completed its merger with Legato II in Feb 2023. Both stocks are currently trading below their $10 transaction price. “This is not unusual for a de-SPAC, but it does highlight the general risk of holding into the merger that we’ve seen,” Kennedy said.

The SPAC market is booming this year, raising nearly 200% more proceeds than this point last year, according to Renaissance Capital data. It is the third-biggest year ever for SPACs, behind 2020 and 2021, measured in deal flow and proceeds, with Kennedy citing an acceleration in retail trading in tech companies, “which are the wheelhouse of SPAC merger activity,” he said.

Transportation technology, in particular, has been a focus for SPAC mergers, including autonomous driving and electrification. Kennedy noted SPACs in the space have mixed track record, with winners including Joby Aviation and Quantumscape, but a significant number of losers including Nikola, Vinfast, Lilium, Vertical Aerospace, Faraday Future, Volta, Polestar, Lucid, Aeye, and Canoo.

There is another trucking-focused SPAC deal underway between Plus.AI and Churchill Capital Corp IX.

Technology

Google sues cybercriminal group behind E-ZPass, USPS text phishing scams

Published

4 hours ago

November 12, 2025

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Google sues cybercriminal group behind E-ZPass, USPS text phishing scams

Signage at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a foreign cybercriminal group behind a massive SMS phishing, or “smishing,” operation.

Dubbed by some cyber researchers as the “Smishing Triad,” the organization, which Google said is largely based out of China, uses a phishing-as-a-service kit named “Lighthouse” to create and deploy attacks using fraudulent texts.

The crime group has amassed over a million victims across 120 countries, Google said in a release.

“They were preying on users’ trust in reputable brands such as E-ZPass, the U.S. Postal Service, and even us as Google,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told CNBC. “The ‘Lighthouse’ enterprise or software creates a bunch of templates in which you create fake websites to pull users’ information.”

Google brought claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse (CFAA) Act and is seeking to dismantle the group and the “Lighthouse” platform.

The texts usually contain malicious links to a fake website designed to steal victims’ sensitive financial information, including social security numbers, banking credentials, and more.

The messages can often appear in the form of a fake fraud alert, delivery update, unpaid government fee notification, or other seemingly urgent texts.

The crime group has stolen approximately between 12.7 million and 115 million credit cards in the U.S. alone, Google said.

“The idea is to prevent its continued proliferation, deter others from doing something similarly, as well as protect both the users and brands that were misused in these websites from future harm,” DeLaine Prado said.

CNBC Daily Open: SoftBank goes all in on OpenAI as ‘Big Short’ investor issues caution on AI firms

Published

7 hours ago

November 12, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: SoftBank goes all in on OpenAI as 'Big Short' investor issues caution on AI firms

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., during a fireside chat at the Nvidia AI Summit Japan in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024.

Akio Kon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SoftBank is selling its entire stake in Nvidia — but not for the reasons you might think.

In its earnings statement released Tuesday, the Japanese group said that it had sold 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October for $5.83 billion.

At first blush, this could be read as a sign that Nvidia’s high valuations are causing SoftBank some unease. And if SoftBank — which infamously pumped $18.5 billion into WeWork only to value it at $2.9 billion eventually — is tamping down on its usual optimism regarding its investments, then retail traders should probably pay attention.

Adding to such worries are comments by Michael Burry — who bet against subprime mortgages before they caused a whole financial crisis in 2008 — on major artificial intelligence companies.

Burry wrote Monday in a post on X that those firms are “understating depreciation” of AI chips, which “artificially boosts earnings — one of the more common frauds of the modern era.” CNBC could not independently confirm that companies were practicing this.

This doesn’t seem to be SoftBank’s concern, however. A person familiar with the group’s sale told CNBC that it had nothing to do with AI valuations. On the contrary, cash from offloading Nvidia chips will be redirected to SoftBank’s $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, the person said.

Burry said in his post that he will reveal “more details” on Nov. 25, and exhorted readers to “stay tuned.” That might not be enough enticement for SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.

— CNBC’s Yun Li, April Roach and Dylan Butts contributed to this report.