Commercial electric vehicle startup Arrival's business continues to struggle. Arrival announced in a regulatory filing on Monday that its UK unit would enter administration. The troubled company, which went public in 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, said it was seeking to sell its UK assets and intellectual property to repay lenders who had helped it keep afloat.
Arrival has raised $300 million in less than a year to try to turn around its business, just a week after Nasdaq announced it would pull the startup's stock from its exchange.
Arrival said other subsidiaries outside the UK will continue to operate, but the company did not explain what that meant. According to the Financial Times, more than 170 jobs are at risk in the UK alone.
Once valued at more than $13 billion and backed by Hyundai Motor and UPS, Arrival boasted that it would revolutionize the way electric vehicles are made. Today, Arrival is valued at just about $9 million.
Central to its electric vehicle vision is the manufacture of electric commercial vans and buses in extremely compact "microfactories" that can be located in city centres. Those plans never came to fruition as the company continued to lose money, while also taking on a range of projects such as electric buses and purpose-built cars for Uber. Arrival has also replaced a number of senior executives and reorganized at least three times, each time laying off employees.
In 2022, Arrival will shift its focus from the British market, where it is headquartered, to the United States, where the first electric vans were supposed to be delivered. The transfer is part of a restructuring aimed at preserving capital. However, this plan failed when Arrival was unable to produce and deliver commercial vehicles.