Hot on the heels of last weeks press release of a binding order from Zeeba, Canoo announced this morning a binding order of 9,300 Vans from another national leasing company Kingbee, with the option to double it to 18,600!
This is really incredible, between the Walmart, Zeeba and Kingbee binding orders alone, Canoo has likely secured well over $500M, and then more than double that again for those three to buy out the rest of the contracts that aren't currently binding. Believe it or not, just these three binding orders represent more in revenue than Canoo's current market cap, and that is assuming a ridiculously cheap price of $30k per unit that could end up being much higher.
Unfortunately we had to ask the same question about Kingbee as did about Zeeba: "who?"
At first glance Kingbee appears to be a relatively new company self described as a leading national work-ready van rental provider. However, upon a slightly closer look they have almost a decade of history as it was the combination of three separate, but related, companies into a single business. Basin Upfitting, Apex Wraps, CrewVanCo. Basin was established in 2013 while Apex and CrewVanCo were founded in 2019 and all three combined together in the beginning of 2021. So at least its an established brand that even has a sense of humor based on the marketing materials found on their homepage.
Kingbee seems like a pretty legitimate company, and we believe they ultimately will have the ability to finance and compete the purchase. However, we have the same issues as we did with the Zeeba press release but even less to go on. We don't know how much this contract is worth, nor has Canoo given an official fulfillment timeline. Gary Gumushian, Global VP of Commercial Fleet Sales, mentioned on a social media post about the order that it was to be completed "over the next couple of years" and again just like we said last week - orders are great but without production what good are they?
Well, on that note, you might really enjoy our next post coming up shortly.
update: The article on Canoos expected SOP has been posted and can be found here!
Authors disclosures: I am long Canoo - I own common shares, warrants and call options.
I saw some of the PR and they kept talking about "wraps" and "upfits". Does Kingbee do anything more than wraps? If so what is it they are doing? Am I just dense because I don't get "upfitting"?