EV Firm Lotus Tech Slashes Annual Deliveries Forecast as EU, US Tariffs Weigh

British sports car maker Lotus unveils its new fully-electric "Emeya" Hyper-GT in New York City, US, September 7, 2023. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs Purchase Licensing Rights
British sports car maker Lotus unveils its new fully-electric "Emeya" Hyper-GT in New York City, US, September 7, 2023. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs Purchase Licensing Rights
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EV Firm Lotus Tech Slashes Annual Deliveries Forecast as EU, US Tariffs Weigh

British sports car maker Lotus unveils its new fully-electric "Emeya" Hyper-GT in New York City, US, September 7, 2023. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs Purchase Licensing Rights
British sports car maker Lotus unveils its new fully-electric "Emeya" Hyper-GT in New York City, US, September 7, 2023. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs Purchase Licensing Rights

EV firm Lotus Technology slashed its deliveries forecast for the year by more than 50% on Wednesday, citing uncertainty posed by new tariffs in the United States and the European Union.

Import tariffs imposed by the European Union, the United States and Canada on China-made EVs have added pressure on companies manufacturing their vehicles in China, adding to costs.

"After assessment of the evolving market conditions, and uncertainties posed by new tariff policies in US and EU, the company has revised its delivery target for 2024 to 12,000 units," the company said, according to Reuters.

The company is headquartered in the Chinese city of Wuhan and produces cars through a partnership with parent firm Geely .

Lotus Tech, which focuses on all-electric lifestyle vehicles, is part of British sports car maker Lotus Group, which is owned by Chinese automaker Geely and Malaysia's Etika Automotive.

The company was valued at about $7 billion in a deal with a special purpose acquisition company when it went public in February, but its value has since fallen to about $3.8 billion.

After China and Europe, the company began taking orders for the Eletre SUV in markets across the Middle East, Asia and the Americas.

Deliveries for the three months ended June 30 stood at 2,679 units, compared with 2,194 vehicles in the first quarter.

Revenue for the second quarter was $225 million, compared with $111 million a year earlier.

Lotus Tech said its net loss widened to $202 million in the April-June period from $193 million a year earlier.

Its plans to expand and entry into new regions have led to higher selling and marketing expenses, which rose 73% to $204.3 million in the quarter.



Cerebras Launches AI Inference Tool to Challenge Nvidia

Cerebras Systems logo is seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. (Reuters)
Cerebras Systems logo is seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. (Reuters)
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Cerebras Launches AI Inference Tool to Challenge Nvidia

Cerebras Systems logo is seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. (Reuters)
Cerebras Systems logo is seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. (Reuters)

Cerebras Systems launched on Tuesday a tool for AI developers that allows them to access the startup's outsized chips to run applications, offering what it says is a much cheaper option than industry-standard Nvidia processors.

Access to Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) - often via a cloud computing provider - to train and deploy large artificial intelligence models used for applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT can be difficult to obtain and expensive to run, a process developers refer to as inference.

"We're delivering performance that cannot be achieved by a GPU," Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told Reuters in an interview. "We're doing it at the highest accuracy, and we're offering it at the lowest price."

The inference portion of the AI market is expected to be fast-growing and attractive - ultimately worth tens of billions of dollars if consumers and businesses adopt AI tools.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company plans to offer several types of the inference product via a developer key and its cloud. The company will also sell its AI systems to customers who prefer to operate their own data centers.

Cerebras' chips - each the size of a dinner plate and called Wafer Scale Engines - avoid one of the issues with AI data crunching: the data crunched by large models that power AI applications typically won't fit on a single chip and can require hundreds or thousands of chips strung together.

That means Cerebras' chips can achieve speedier performances, Feldman said.

It plans to charge users as little as 10 cents per million tokens, which are one of the ways companies can measure the amount of output data from a large model.

Cerebras is aiming to go public and filed a confidential prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month, the company said.