WSJ: Rivian’s Chief Operating Officer Departed Amid Production Ramp-Up

[FutureBoy]

Rivian’s Chief Operating Officer Departed Amid Production Ramp-Up
Electric-truck maker produced more than 1,000 vehicles in 2021, in line with its lowered expectations

Rivian vehicles in New York’s Times Square in November to mark the company’s initial public offering.
PHOTO: ANN-SOPHIE FJELLO-JENSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS


The chief operating officer of electric-truck maker Rivian RIVN 2.59% Automotive Inc. left the company last month as the startup was ramping up production of its first three models.

Rivian ultimately produced more than 1,000 vehicles by the end of 2021, a company spokeswoman said Monday. Rivian had warned last month that the company would likely fall a few hundred short of its goal to build 1,200 vehicles last year.

Rod Copes retired from Rivian in December, the spokeswoman confirmed Monday. Mr. Copes’s retirement was planned for months, she said, and his duties have been absorbed by the leadership team. As of Monday afternoon, Mr. Copes was still identified on Rivian’s website as the company’s operations chief.

Rod Copes, who retired from Rivian in December, was previously an executive at the Royal Enfield motorcycle company.
PHOTO: MIKE DE SISTI/ZUMA PRESS

Mr. Copes couldn’t be immediately reached for comment. Before joining the startup in June 2020, he had been an executive at motorcycle companies Royal Enfield, a unit of India’s Eicher Motors Ltd. , and Harley-Davidson Inc.

On Monday, Rivian shares closed down 5.6% to $81.44 amid a broader market selloff. Shares lost 3.2% in after-hours trading after The Wall Street Journal reported on Mr. Copes’s departure.

In November, Rivian raised $13.7 billion in the largest initial offering on a U.S. exchange since 2014. The stock skyrocketed in its early days trading, hitting a closing high of $172.01 on its fifth day of trading after listing at $78. Its market valuation eclipsed that of auto makers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. The stock has been on a steady slide since. The downturn picked up speed in December, after Rivian chief executive and founder RJ Scaringe told analysts on the company’s first earnings call that the startup expected to miss its production target.

Adding pressure recently to the stock has been legacy auto makers encroaching on Rivian’s main business lines. Last week, global auto maker Stellantis NV, which owns the Ram and Chrysler brands, said it signed a deal to begin supplying electric delivery vans to Amazon.com Inc. in 2023.

Amazon, which owns about 19% of Rivian, also has a deal to buy 100,000 vans from Rivian, which the startup says it anticipates fulfilling by the end of 2025. Spokeswomen for both Amazon and Rivian said their partnership remains intact and both companies expected Amazon to source vehicles from multiple companies.

Other companies are close to bringing electric pickup trucks to market, winnowing the first-mover advantage of Rivian’s R1T pickup truck, which began sales in September and is the only electric pickup available on the U.S. market. Ford plans to begin sales of an electric version of its F-150 pickup this spring, and GM last week revealed a new electric version of its Silverado pickup to debut in 2023. The valuations of both Ford and GM have overtaken that of Rivian.

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[FutureBoy]

Is this a sign of how difficult it is to ramp up production? Or is Mr. Copes just a quitter?

My guess is that the difficulty of scaling up production is going to be more and more apparent over the next couple of years as Rivian tries to increase production. And this just goes to show how amazing Tesla really is. Basically, any company that has not ramped a large and fast production line is just a niche player at best till they prove their production chops. My guess is that the ramping skill might also be something that can be lost over time so anyone who has not ramped relatively recently might also be in for a painful exercise.

On a side note, I found this article after searching for a source that might be more reputable than the original article I saw. In the search, I was told that Rivian's CEO had resigned (Wrong title). And that the Rivian COO Pole Copes had resigned (Wrong name). Hard to trust the news when there are so many people getting it so wrong.

It's also amazing to me that this news of something happening "last month" to a publicly-traded company is just now coming out. Seems like either no one on wall street cares about Rivian or Rivian was hiding something.

 

[Ogre]

Rivian is an odd duck.

The company is 12! Years old. What have they been doing for 9 years?

Most of their executive team was hired between 2019 and 2021 (Mostly within the past 18 months). Look over their executive page, most of them were hired long *after* the truck was designed.

They bought their factory in early 2017 … but they are apparently only just now ramping up production?

It’s all a giant bag of weirdness. It all makes me wonder WTF they’ve been doing for the past 3 years or so while they were sitting on a massive pile of pre-orders.

Buy a factory, build a prototype, sell it to thousands of people…. ***THEN*** start hiring your executive team.

Something seems wrong with this. Maybe they just had a ton of turnover prior to this executive team coming online? None of it seems like a good way to run a company.

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