Auto Industry News

Auto stocks continue to trend heavily after last week’s earnings report from Tesla. As a result, there was a lot of auto news to recap today. 📰

First up, Toyota Motors managed to defend its title as the world’s top-selling automaker for the third straight year…despite falling sales. The company sold 10.5 million vehicles in 2022, with Volkswagen Group behind it at 8.3 million vehicles. 🏆

Next, Renault and Nissan agreed to a sweeping restructuring of the alliance they’ve had in place since 1999. Renault is set to transfer 28.4% of Nissan shares into a French trust, reducing its stake from 43% to 15%. While Renault would still receive the economic benefit of these shares, its voting rights would be discarded for most corporate decisions. The move equalizes the companies’ cross-share holdings and gives them each the ability to freely exercise the voting rights of their 15% direct shareholdings. 🗳️

Thirdly, Tesla continues to lead the charge in the electric vehicle space as competitors look to follow its lead. After Tesla’s recent price cuts, Ford is now increasing production and cutting prices on its electric Mustang Mach-E crossover to improve affordability and spur demand.

This likely isn’t the last time we see something like this, as the industry’s global players continue competing fiercely for customers. 🔻

Lastly, the short squeeze in Carvana continues, with shares rising another 28% today. 📈

Auto names like $LCID, $TSLA, $CVNA, $PEV, and more continue to trend regularly and will be a highlight of earnings season as they report. 👀

Nio & Nikola’s Never-Ending Story

No matter the day, there seems to be an endless stream of electric vehicle (EV) industry news. Let’s get into today’s headlines. 📰

First up is China’s Nio, which just received an additional $2.2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings, which raised its stake to 20.1%. The fund had last invested in Nio during July, with a $1 billion investment. 

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PayPal Pops Ahead Of Key Event

It’s been a rough few years for payment giant PayPal, with shares falling 85% peak-to-trough. Recently, the stock has begun to rebound with other beaten-down tech names but remains about 80% below all-time highs. In other words, it would need to nearly 5x its share price to reach those levels again. 📈

While that may seem a ways off, investors have recently pushed shares to their best three-day run since the end of 2022. That’s because the company promised to roll out new “customer-backed innovation” at an event next Thursday, with its new CEO Alex Chriss saying, “It is very clear what we need to do.”

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AT&T Suffers Major Outage

Those who work at AT&T today did not have a great day, but those who use their services had a pretty good excuse to chill out at work today. That’s because the telecom giant experienced a nationwide cellphone outage that impacted tens of thousands of its customers today. 📵

While the nation’s largest carrier said it restored wireless service to all impacted customers by midday, no reason has been given for the outages. With T-Mobile and Verizon’s networks unaffected, regulators quickly questioned whether AT&T experienced a hack or other cyberattack. 📡

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DWAC Bounces Back (Again)

We mentioned last week that investors were preparing for a politically driven 2024, and boy, that accelerated quickly. 😜

Trump-linked stocks Digital World Acquisition Corp, Phunware, and Rumble jumped sharply today after Ron DeSantis canceled his presidential run.

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