(Reuters) -Shares of Lucid Group Inc rose as much as 11% on their Nasdaq debut on Monday after the electric-vehicle maker completed its merger with a blank-check company backed by Wall Street dealmaker Michael Klein.
The luxury electric-vehicle maker, run by an ex-Tesla engineer, had agreed to go public in February through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp IV. The merger gave the combined company a pro-forma equity value of $24 billion.
Lucid’s listing is a huge dividend for the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which had invested over $1 billion in the electric-car maker in 2018 to take a substantial stake. PIF, in a tweet, congratulated Lucid after it went public today.
Shares of Lucid, which opened at $25.24, were up 6.5% in early trading.
With emission regulations being made tougher in Europe and elsewhere, the Biden administration’s green wave push in the U.S. as well as the rise of electric-car maker Tesla Inc have investors rushing into the EV sector.
Other prominent players in the sector went public through mergers with so-called special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) last year. While some deals such as Fisker have delivered, others such as Nikola have given up short-term gains.
Although SPACs had gained immense popularity among retail traders as well as Wall Street funds last year, a fear of a bubble and frothy valuations triggered a sell-off in shares of SPACs in March.
(Reporting by Chavi Mehta and Sohini Podder in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Saeed Azhar in Dubai; Editing by Aditya Soni)
