Buy TSX:EFL for electric vehicle exposure, this investor says

If you’re looking for an interesting play in the still-emerging electric vehicle industry then lithium ion battery company Electrovaya (Electrovaya Stock Quote, Chart, News TSX:EFL) might just be your ticket, says Tim Nash, founder of Good Investing.

“They’re a big player when it comes to the electric vehicle market. It’s a very small stock at this moment in time, so tread with caution. This is one of these bets where if this pays off I can see it doing very, very well,” said Nash, appearing on BNN Bloomberg on Tuesday.

“That said, we are seeing the car companies put a huge amount of R&D on developing this technology internally. At the share price that it is now, you might see an acquisition if there is a car company that wants this technology but doesn’t want to develop it themselves,” he says.

Mississauga-based Electrovaya designs, develops and manufactures proprietary lithium ion technology including battery systems and battery-related products for not only cars and other vehicles but for power grids and medical and mobile devices. The company went public in 2000 and has traded in sub-$1.00 territory for the most part, aside from a few spikes up into the $3.00 range.

The stock has been mired in the $0.20 range for more than a year.

Nash says that the stock could be worth a gamble but it’s uncertain which battery tech will win out in the electric auto market.

“This would be a small part of any portfolio — you want to be careful betting on these specific technologies,” he says. “Lithium ion, I think that that’s going to be the winner for the next little bit, but I’m always worried about disruption coming through in the energy storage market, that next-generation battery which would make this obsolete.”

“This is a technology that’s going to take a while for a lot of these electric vehicles to come to market. It will be 2022 to 2025 when a lot of these big companies like Volkswagen and Toyota are going to have their ‘Tesla-killers’ hitting the market,” Nash says.

“It’s one of those things where it’ll really depend on what battery technologies they end up going with, and if they pick Electrovaya as that supplier, that’s going to be a huge revenue earner but if they end up going with a competitor or a different type of technology then this company could continue to languish as a penny stock,” he said.

Electrovaya last presented its financials in August for its fiscal third quarter 2019, where it racked up $1.6 million in revenue, almost a 200-per-cent increase year-over-year, and an EBITDA loss of $0.8 million, which compared to an EBITDA loss of $2.2 million a year earlier.

Management announced that the company sold and delivered batteries to 26 commercial operating sites in the US, Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica by the quarter’s end, while the company is currently working on a $3.8-million electric bus battery development program, with a purchase order for a 300kWh, 600V battery system to power an electric bus already in hand.

In September, the company signed a second term sheet credit facility for up to $5.5 million (earlier this summer it announced a $1.5-million credit facility) to help fund its Walmart purchase orders worth more than $7 million.