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Oil companies had a blow-out quarter. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote today, oil and gas companies cashed in on the global price surge triggered by the Iran war. Their refining businesses did particularly well. But their results also revealed that global oil demand continues to fall — at least for now.
Some data center bets are starting to pay off. As I wrote on Wednesday, Microsoft had a bonanza quarter, and its Azure cloud business — which allows other companies to rent its data centers — grew faster than Wall Street expected.
That matters because America’s biggest tech companies have spent the past few years transforming into industrial firms, building massive new infrastructure and driving up U.S. electricity demand — and that strategy, contrary to some expectations, seems to be working for now.
Rivian is optimistic. The most important U.S. electric vehicle maker not run by Elon Musk released their second quarter results on Thursday night. The outlook was … decent!
The company delivered almost 12,200 vehicles last quarter. This was Rivian’s best period for sales since the third quarter of last year, when every EV maker’s results were juiced because the Inflation Reduction Act’s EV leasing tax credit expired.
Crucially, this was our first look at Rivian’s sales since it started delivering its more affordable (and well-reviewed) crossover, the R2. That vehicle started going out to customers at the very end of the quarter in mid-June, so we only get a snippet of those deliveries in this number.
More heartening, I think, is Rivian’s forward guidance. It now expects to deliver 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles this year, which implies it will deliver an average of more than 21,000 over the next two quarters. That would make Q3 and Q4 of this year its best sales periods ever.
RJ Scaringe, the company’s CEO, said that R2 sales conversions were running “meaningfully higher” than the company projected. The company still lost $379 million last quarter, but that was much better than analysts had projected.
We last checked in on Rivian when they sold new stock earlier this month to fund collateral for an Energy Department loan that will let them build a second factory in Georgia. On the call yesterday, executives confirmed they expect to start drawing on that loan in early 2027, part of what it painted as a healthy cash flow picture. For all the optimism, though, investors seemingly remain skeptical: Its stock fell 8% today.
