Australian DC fast-charging company Tritium has been warned it could lose its status on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US after a dramatic price slump that has seen the stock lose nearly 90 per cent of its value in the past year.
Tritium said this week it had received a formal notice from Nasdaq earlier this month noting that its stock had been trading under the minimum bid limit of $US1 for 30 consecutive business days.
To remain compliant with the listing rules, the stock must trade above $US1 for at least 10 consecutive business days. Â It has at least another six months to achieve this. Its stock last traded at just US0.29.
Tritium’s stock has fallen dramatically from its 2021 listing price of $US10 a share in a stock market float that delivered windfall profits, at least on paper, to two of its biggest backers, former coal barons Trevor St Baker and Brian Flannery.
But the stock has performed poorly since early 2022. The stock has fallen 20 per cent just over the past five trading days, 42 per cent over the last month since it released its latest annual results, and plunged 86 per cent over the last year.
Tritium’s full year results released in late September revealed another hefty loss of $US121.4 million, a slight improvement on the $US128.9 million loss a year earlier, and came despite improved margins and a doubling of sales to $US185 million.
The company also announced it had locked in $US75 million in new financing commitments, after finishing the year with $US29.4 million in cash, down from $US70.8 million a year earlier.
Tritium’s problems also relate to the reliability of its fast chargers – a problem, it should be noted, is widespread in the industry apart from the Tesla Supercharging network.
The US Department of Energy said earlier this month that nearly 4,000 public charging stations were out of service across the US as of October 5, an outage rate of more than 6 per cent.
According to Automotive News in the US, data cruncher Here Technologies estimates that 4,673 chargers were out of order across the US as of early October, but it said many more “unconnected” charge points were inoperable.
Tritium made a point in its release and presentation in September that its latest modular technology was achieving uptime of 97 per cent and 98 per cent with some charging network operators.
But as a listed company focusing entirely on the EV charging space, it is also most exposed to changes in sentiment. Its options to avoid a Nasdaq de-listing include consolidating its stock, also known as a reverse share split, which could push the price up by having fewer shares.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.