A Lucid Air Grand Touring electric luxury car.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
Citigroup is staying bullish on electric-vehicle startup Lucid to start the new year. Analyst Itay Michaeli resumed coverage of Lucid with a Buy rating and $57 price target.
Lucid (ticker: LCID) stock rose 7.6% Monday. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 0.6% and 0.7%, respectively.
Analysts can suspend coverage of a stock for a number of reasons, chief among them is a requirement to do so when the bank is working with the company on a large project. Citi declined to comment about the reason for Michaeli’s recent coverage suspension.
But he’s back and the $57 target price is the highest on Wall Street, according to Bloomberg and FactSet. Lucid targets are all over the place, ranging from about $16 to $57 a share.
That isn’t much help to investors. The number of ratings doesn’t help much either. There are only four people covering Lucid stock, according to Bloomberg. Two rate shares at Buy, one has a Hold rating and one a Sell.
Lucid stock, however, is valued at about $63 billion. A car company of that size should have 20-plus analysts covering the stock. Rivian Automotive (RIVN), another EV startup, has about 15 analysts covering the stock.
Rivian, however, became publicly traded in a traditional initial public offering. Lucid went public via as SPAC merger. That can be one reason for the difference in coverage. Still, Lucid finished its merger months ago. It’s a little odd, frankly, that so few have picked up coverage of a stock worth so much.
The $57 price target values Lucid at about at almost $100 billion. That would make it one of the most valuable car companies on the planet.
“We are constructive on the Lucid story and its position in the EV/Car of the Future theme,” wrote the analyst in a report on Monday. He believes Lucid has industry leading range and charging performance as well as solid internally developed self-driving features.
Still, he notes that Lucid is pre-sales. The company is just on the cusp of delivering volume of its first luxury sedan, the Lucid Air, in 2022. For now, Michaeli prefers the potential of Lucid to the more established EV player Tesla (TSLA). Michaeli actually rates Tesla stock Sell. His recent Tesla target price was $262, valuing that stock at about $262 billion.
Write to Al Root at [email protected]
