Rivian pauses plans to make Mercedes electric vans Europe

Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss Amazon-backed EV maker Rivian walking away from its plans to manufacture electric vans with Mercedes Benz.

Video transcript

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BRAD SMITH: It's time for Cut for Time, everyone. Three stories, one minute each. We start with this today, Rivian is our trending ticker. It's climbing actually on our Trending Ticker page this morning, after the Amazon-backed EV maker announced it's walking away from plans it had with Mercedes-Benz to build electric vans in Europe.

You're seeing the shares there declined by about 3.3% on this news as well. This was called out and their most recent earnings period, too.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, they said they want to focus on their sort of core business, right?

BRAD SMITH: Yeah.

JULIE HYMAN: And so it seems like that's why they're stopping doing this.

BRIAN SOZZI: I love this. When I went back to see when this deal was originally announced in late September, we thought the press release, these companies were gonna change the world. And they were gonna come out with all these electric vans and take them around the globe. Well, it fell flat on his face. Why? Because this company has lost billions of this year.

And I think you see the founder RJ Scaringe really look internal and think, you know what? We have to focus on our operations here. We cannot be doing all these things. Let's just focus on making our EVs that really, I don't know, not a lot people are buying.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah, they said, "At this time, we believe in focusing on our consumer business as well as our existing commercial business, and represent-- that represents for them the most attractive near-term opportunities to maximize the value for Rivian.