(Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may file a lawsuit later this month against Amazon.com after the company did not offer concessions to settle antitrust claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The lawsuit will target the company’s logistics program, Fulfillment by Amazon, pricing on its website by third-party sellers and will suggest “structural remedies” that could break the company up, the report said on Tuesday.

Amazon and the regulator declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

The company’s shares, which have gained about 63% so far this year, edged 0.4% lower in extended trading.

The probe began during former President Donald Trump’s administration when the government decided to investigate Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms and Apple for allegedly breaking antitrust law.

Amazon has been criticized for allegedly favoring its own products and disfavoring outside sellers on its platform, among other allegations. The company has denied the allegations.

FTC chairperson Lina Khan authored a Yale Law Journal article in 2017, in which she said Amazon’s structure and practices posed anticompetitive concerns and has escaped antitrust scrutiny.

In June, the regulator sued Amazon accusing the company of enrolling millions of consumers into its $139-per-year paid subscription service without their consent and making it hard for them to cancel the plan.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

BEIJING (Reuters) – Tesla Shanghai has sued a Chinese firm over tech secret infringement and unfair competition disputes, Shanghai Securities Journal reported on Tuesday.

The lawsuit against Bingling Intelligent Technology, a chip designer and auto parts maker based in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, will be heard in the Shanghai intellectual property court on October 10, according to the report.

A investment fund unit of Xiaomi owns 11.9% of Bingling, the report said, citing Chinese business data platform Tianyancha.

(Reporting by Qiaoyi Li and Brenda Goh; editing by Jason Neely)

(This Sept. 1 story has been corrected to change Jake Jolly’s title to head of investment analysis in paragraph 10)

By David Randall

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Signs of rising consumer stress are prompting some fund managers to grow more conservative in their outlooks, even as the broad stock market continues to rally.

While unemployment remains near historic lows, the Federal Reserve’s inflation-fighting interest rate hikes are starting to weigh on households.

Consumer confidence fell more than expected in August, while delinquency rates among credit cards issued by smaller banks are the highest on record, according to data from the Apollo Group.

Department store Nordstrom said last week that delinquencies on its store cards are now higher than pre-pandemic levels. Rival Macy’s said it expects late payments to reduce credit-card revenues by 41% from the previous quarter.

Payments on approximately $1.1 trillion of federal student loans will resume in October, potentially setting consumers up for a “payment shock” of $500 or more each month, according to a study by TransUnion.

“The U.S. consumer is on thin ice coming into the final stretch of 2023,” said Emily Roland, co-chief investment strategist at John Hancock Investment Management. She is more bullish on bonds and defensive sectors like healthcare ahead of the fourth-quarter holiday shopping season.

The U.S. economy added 187,000 non-farm jobs in August, slightly above expectations, while the unemployment rate rose to 3.8%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. The government significantly lowered its previously reported estimates for job growth for June and July.

Further declines in the labor market will likely act as a double-edged sword for investors, relieving some inflation pressures while weighing on consumer spending.

Overall consumer spending rose slightly more than expected in August, while the savings rate fell to its lowest since November 2022, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.

Consumers will “very soon” exhaust their excess savings built up during the pandemic, said Jake Jolly, head of investment analysis at BNY Mellon Investment Management, who is underweight equities and expects that the U.S. economy is on the path toward a recession.

“It does beg the question of how long consumer spending can surprise to the upside,” he said, adding that bonds continue to look more appealing, given a rise in yields that has pushed the 10-year Treasury yield above 4%.

Overall, consumer spending growth will fall from 2.3% in 2023 to 0.9% in 2024, said Gregory Daco, chief economist at accounting giant Ernst & Young, due to higher interest charges, fewer available savings and student loan payments. He said the economy will post below-trend growth for several quarters.

Investors will receive an updated view of consumer credit usage and a reading of the ISM services sector, which accounts for two-thirds of the economy, next week.

Betting against the consumer spending has so far been a losing wager. The US economy continues to grow at what the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimates is an annualized 5.9% rate in the third quarter.

Interest rates are likely to fall over the fourth quarter of the year and into 2024 as inflation fears ebb, providing some cushion for consumers, said Jason Draho, head of asset allocation Americas at UBS Global Wealth Management, who expects investors to buy into any dips in consumer stocks.

“The US consumer, and therefore the economy, should remain fairly resilient well into 2024,” he said.

The consumer discretionary sector, which includes stocks like Amazon.com, Royal Caribbean Cruises and Chipotle Mexican Grill, is up nearly 34% for the year to date, nearly double the gain of the S&P 500 index as a whole.

Yet the sector has lagged lately, gaining less than 1% since July 1 while the S&P 500 is up nearly 2% over the same time.

Even if consumer spending does fall significantly, the strong rally in the sector will likely wane as the tech-driven broader market slows over the fourth quarter, said Sandy Villere, a portfolio manager at Villere & Co.

As a result, Villere is building up his positions in defensive sectors such as healthcare that have not lagged.

“We think it’s premature to move away from the consumer now, but we can see a recession hitting in the first quarter as the Fed’s rate hikes start to kick in,” he said.

(Reporting by David Randall; editing by Megan Davies and Andy Sullivan)

By Lisa Pauline Mattackal and Medha Singh

(Reuters) – For venture capitalists, the scars of bitcoin’s disastrous 2022 run deep.

While breezy bitcoin has bounced back, leaping by about 55% this year, investments in crypto startups have dropped for the fifth straight quarter.

VC crypto bets totaled just under $2.3 billion in April-July this year, the lowest quarterly level for over three years, according to data firm PitchBook. In the first half of 2023, investments were down by almost three-quarters from a year ago to $5 billion.

“The lofty exuberant valuation days are gone,” said Tal Elyashiv, founder and managing partner of SPiCE VC, adding that valuations place on crypto companies had fallen closer in line with their actual performance.

Crypto investors remain haunted by the chaos that descended on the sector last year when the implosion of the FTX exchange and other major firms, including hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, sent shockwaves through the industry.

U.S. regulatory scrutiny has also tightened on the industry.

“The biggest change from the height of the market is more time to do deeper diligence,” said Cameron Peake, partner at Restive Ventures. “There’s not necessarily anything new that is happening, except that funds are actually doing diligence now. Deals are no longer closing in mere days.”

The number of deals that were sealed by the halfway mark of 2023 was 814, down by more than half of 1,862 from the same period in 2022, PitchBook data showed.

“Almost every company in the space tightened up in the aftermath of the carnage of 2022. Those that are raising capital now are probably doing it because they have to,” said Adam Reeds, CEO of Toronto-based crypto finance company Ledn.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near term that changes from ‘have to have’ raises to ‘nice to have’ raises.”

If bitcoin prices are any indication, the investment slump may be short-lived.

VC crypto investments have correlated with crypto asset prices with a lag of roughly three to six months, according to PitchBook, and if current trends continue, VC investment would rise during the second half of 2023.

Bitcoin, which fell 65% last year, jumped over 90% in the first six months of 2023 bitcoin and is now up about 55% year-to-date, at $25,881. Still, it is trading at a third of its 2021 peak of $69,000.

METAVERSE? NFTs?

There has also been a shift in the type of VC investment targets, according to the PitchBook data.

A year ago, the focus was on companies tied to speculative non-fungible tokens, as well as metaverse and Web3 projects that sought to build a future – but still unrealized – iteration of the internet with crypto at its core.

Now, though, crypto bets have shifted towards firms that provide the platform or support the underlying technology of blockchain or cryptocurrencies.

Infrastructure firms such as crypto exchanges, wallets and other fintechs attracted the most investments in 2023 at $325 million, followed by blockchain networks at $220 million and Web3 companies at $274.6 million, according to PitchBook.

In the second quarter, the only two funding rounds over $100 million were scored by LayerZero, a platform that connects two blockchains, and digital identity platform WorldCoin.

“Institutional investors are looking for things that are more durable,” said Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark.

“We’re seeing less appetite for risk and more appetite for sustaining technology.”

(Reporting by Medha Singh and Lisa Pauline Mattackal in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Wilson and Pravin Char)

MADRID (Reuters) -At least three people died and three were missing as record rainfall caused heavy flooding in central Spain, shutting roads, subway lines and high-speed train connections, authorities said on Monday.

Helicopters were sent to rescue people who had sought refuge on the roofs of their homes in the Toledo area some 50 km (31 miles) southwest of Madrid, emergency services said.

The sudden downpour on Sunday and early Monday transformed streets into rivers of mud that swept away cars and trash bins in Madrid, Castile-La Mancha, Catalonia and Valencia regions. Hail also fell in many areas.

Three people died in the countryside around the central city of Toledo, where the weather service AEMET registered record rainfall of 90 litres per square metre on Sunday.

One of the victims was a young man who was trapped in a lift that filled up with water, while another was inside a vehicle when it got flooded, police said.

The third person who died was a 50-year-old man who had been reported as missing. His body was found in the afternoon floating in a river near his home in the town of Camarena.

“It just kept raining and we were a little scared, but we were indoors so we were safe,” said Isabella Stewart, a U.S. missionary living in Toledo as she was taking a bus.

Another Toledo resident, Ruben Gonzalez, said: “I live four blocks away and it was very strong. Everything is flooded. This is crazy.”

Later on Monday, AEMET said the cut-off low phenomenon – also known as weatherman’s woe – that had caused the downpour was starting to move away from the country.

In the Madrid region, emergency services tackled almost 1,200 incidents overnight and firefighters and police were searching for one man in the rural area of Aldea del Fresno, southwest of Madrid, the emergency services said.

The man went missing with his son when their car was dragged into the Alberche River after an avalanche caused by a sudden spate.

“The minor was rescued after he had climbed up a tree,” the Madrid emergency service said.

Rescuers were also looking for a woman who disappeared under similar circumstances near Toledo and for an 84-year-old man who was dragged away by streams of water and mud in Villamanta, west of Madrid.

Several roads in the Madrid region were closed as half a dozen bridges were torn down by water overflowing the riverbanks.

The defence ministry said it had deployed army engineers to build a so-called Bailey bridge – a type of portable truss bridge – in Aldea del Fresno to connect the banks after the original bridge was swept away.

Several subway lines were closed in central Madrid early on Monday, though the service was re-established in most of the city during the morning, subway operator Metro de Madrid said in a statement.

Some high-speed connections between Madrid and the southern region of Andalusia have resumed, but trains were operating at lower-than-normal speeds.

(Reporting by Inti Landauro, Emma Pinedo and David Latona; Editing by Andrei Khalip, Angus MacSwan and Christina Fincher)

By Matt McKnight and Anna Tong

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada (Reuters) -Burning Man organizers reopened the road leading out of the remote Nevada desert festival on Monday, allowing tens of thousands of attendees to escape after they had been trapped for days by mud.

But many of the 64,000 people who remained on site as of Monday may choose to stay one more night and watch the festival’s giant namesake effigy go up in flames on Monday night, one day past schedule.

Unexpected summer rain turned the weeklong, annual counterculture arts festival into a muddy nightmare.

When the road finally reopened, a long line of vehicles snaked through the desert, inching along in an epic traffic jam as event organizers urged drivers to take it slowly on Monday and consider delaying their departure until Tuesday to reduce traffic.

Eventually the traffic formed into an organized exodus 10 lanes wide, an armada of recreational vehicles and cars seeking the promised land of a hot shower and a clean bed.

The way out is a 5-mile (8-km) dirt road to the nearest highway. The Burning Man Traffic account on social media platform X estimated “exodus” travel time at 5-1/2 hours.

The site in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert sits atop the former Lake Lahontan, which the U.S. Geological Society describes as a deep lake that existed as recently as 15,000 years ago. It is about 15 miles (25 km) from the nearest town and 110 miles (177 km) north of Reno.

For days, up to 70,000 people were ordered to stay put and conserve food and water as officials closed the roads, requiring vehicles to stay put.

“People are taking care of each other. We have food. We have provisions. We have shelter. So it’s really kind of a group effort to get through this,” said attendee David Date.

One person died at the event, officials said on Sunday, providing few details. An investigation was under way.

“It really looked apocalyptic,” said festival volunteer Evi Airy. “When you see the people walking barefoot in such a cold with the children. Some people have a small child here like three years old, four years old. I don’t know how they survived.”

Even before the gate was officially open, campers started leaving while it was still dark. Stuck vehicles littered the roads in the makeshift Black Rock City that springs up for the festival, some of them horizontally blocking lanes roads because they had lost control.

The desert path to the main gate was a graveyard of marooned cars, which will challenge the event’s ethos of “leave no trace” of human activity in the desert.

At one point event workers gave instructions on how to traverse a “river” created by the rain, placing cones on an arc with instructions to take the bend at 20 mph (30 kph), a course that still bathed vehicles in mud. But just past that final obstacle lay the gravel road toward civilization.

The temporary airport serving the festival was reopened earlier on Monday.

Every year Burning Man brings tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to dance, make art and enjoy being part of a self-sufficient, temporary community of like-minded spirits. Originating in 1986 as a small gathering on a San Francisco beach, the week-long festival is now attended by celebrities and social media influencers. A regular ticket costs $575.

The festival typically has a penultimate night send-off with the burning of a giant wooden effigy of a man, along with a fireworks show. Originally set for Sunday night, it was rescheduled for Monday night at 9 p.m. PDT (0400 GMT on Tuesday), organizers said.

(Reporting by Matt McKnight and Anna Tong at Black Rock City, Rich McKay in Atlanta, and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien, Nick Zieminski and Sandra Maler)

By Matt McKnight and Anna Tong

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada (Reuters) -Burning Man organizers reopened the road leading out of the remote Nevada desert festival on Monday, allowing tens of thousands of attendees to escape after they had been trapped for days by mud.

But many of the 64,000 people who remained on site as of Monday may choose to stay one more night and watch the festival’s giant namesake effigy go up in flames on Monday night, one day past schedule.

Unexpected summer rain turned the weeklong, annual counterculture arts festival into a muddy nightmare.

When the road finally reopened, a long line of vehicles snaked through the desert, inching along in an epic traffic jam as event organizers urged drivers to take it slowly on Monday and consider delaying their departure until Tuesday to reduce traffic.

“It really looked apocalyptic,” said festival volunteer Evi Airy. “When you see the people walking barefoot in such a cold with the children. Some people have a small child here like three years old, four years old. I don’t know how they survived.”

The site in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert sits atop the former Lake Lahontan, which the U.S. Geological Society describes as a deep lake that existed as recently as 15,000 years ago. It is about 15 miles (25 km) from the nearest town and 110 miles (177 km) north of Reno.

For days, up to 70,000 people were ordered to stay put and conserve food and water as officials closed the roads, requiring vehicles to stay put. One person died at the event, officials said on Sunday, providing few details. An investigation was under way.

The way out is a 5-mile (8-km) dirt road to the nearest highway.

Even before the gate was officially open, campers started leaving while it was still dark. Stuck vehicles littered the roads in the makeshift Black Rock City that springs up for the festival, some of them horizontally blocking lanes roads because they had lost control.

The desert path to the main gate was a graveyard of marooned cars.

At one point event workers gave instructions on how to traverse a “river” created by the rain, placing cones on an arc with instructions to take the bend at 20 mph (30 kph), a course that still bathed vehicles in mud. But just past that final obstacle lay the gravel road toward civilization.

The temporary airport serving the festival was reopened earlier on Monday.

National Weather Service forecasters said on Monday the rain was over, after reporting the area received from three-quarters of an inch to 1.5 inches (1.9 to 3.8 cm) of rain since late on Friday.

Some festival-goers ignored the order to stay put and attempted to walk or drive out to the highway.

Others partied on in the rain.

Videos posted to social media showed costumed revelers – including a few children – sliding through the sticky mess, most of them covered from head to toe in wet earth.

Every year Burning Man brings tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to dance, make art and enjoy being part of a self-sufficient, temporary community of like-minded spirits. Originating in 1986 as a small gathering on a San Francisco beach, the week-long festival is now attended by celebrities and social media influencers. A regular ticket costs $575.

The festival typically has a penultimate night send-off with the burning of a giant wooden effigy of a man, along with a fireworks show. Originally set for Sunday night, it was rescheduled for Monday night at 9 p.m. PDT (0400 GMT on Tuesday), organizers said.

(Reporting by Matt McKnight and Anna Tong at Black Rock City, Rich McKay in Atlanta, and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien, Nick Zieminski and Sandra Maler)

By Matt McKnight and Anna Tong

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada (Reuters) -Burning Man organizers reopened the road leading out of the remote Nevada desert festival on Monday, allowing tens of thousands of attendees to escape after they had been trapped for days by mud.

But many of the 64,000 people who remained on site as of Monday may choose to stay one more night and watch the festival’s giant namesake effigy go up in flames Monday night, one day past schedule.

Unexpected summer rain turned the weeklong, annual counterculture arts festival into a muddy nightmare.

The site in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert sits atop the former Lake Lahontan, which the U.S. Geological Society describes as a deep lake that existed as recently as 15,000 years ago. It is about 15 miles (25 km) from the nearest town and 110 miles (177 km) north of Reno.

For days, up to 70,000 people were ordered to stay put and conserve food and water as officials closed the roads, requiring vehicles to stay put.

One person died at the event, officials said on Sunday, providing few details. An investigation was under way.

Event organizers urged drivers to take it slow on Monday and consider delaying their departure until Tuesday to reduce traffic. Even before the road opened, some attendees told Reuters a steady stream of vehicles had left since pre-dawn, many struggling through the slop.

The way out is a 5-mile (8-km) dirt road to the nearest highway. Photos shared online showed hefty recreational vehicles sunk up to the tire rims in mud, with some using boards under the wheels to help get traction.

The temporary airport serving the festival was reopened on Monday, according to the X account Burning Man Traffic, with all outgoing flights destined for Reno, Nevada. Flights to Burbank, near Los Angeles, and Oakland were set to resume on Tuesday. Black Rock City Municipal Airport appears in the desert for 13 days each year around festival time, using two runways on the dry lake bed, and then disappears, according to its website.

National Weather Service forecasters said on Monday the rain was over, after reporting the area received from three-quarters of an inch to 1.5 inches (1.9 to 3.8 cm) of rain since late Friday.

Some festival-goers ignored the order to stay put and attempted to walk or drive out to the highway.

Others partied on in the rain.

Videos posted to social media showed costumed revelers – including a few children – sliding through the sticky mess, most of them covered from head to toe in wet earth.

“When you get pushed to extremes, that’s when the most fun happens,” said Brian Fraoli, 45, a veteran “burner” who works in finance in New York.

Fraoli said he had tried to drag his luggage through the mud and escape, but gave up and decided to relax and enjoy the experience. “Overall it was an amazing week and next time we will be more prepared,” he said.

Every year Burning Man brings tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to dance, make art and enjoy being part of a self-sufficient, temporary community of like-minded spirits. Originating in 1986 as a small gathering on a San Francisco beach, the weeklong festival is now attended by celebrities and social media influencers. A regular ticket costs $575.

The festival typically has a penultimate night send-off with the burning of a giant wooden effigy of a man, along with a fireworks show. Originally set for Sunday night, it was rescheduled for Monday night at 9 p.m. PDT (0400 GMT on Tuesday), organizers said.

(Reporting by Matt McKnight and Anna Tong at Black Rock City, Rich McKay in Atlanta, and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Nick Zieminski)

Hot Stocks Under $10 

Diversification is an important part of any sound investment strategy. 

In fact, it’s critical that a portfolio be well-balanced to help minimize risk and maximize opportunity.  After all, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. Plus, not only can diversification reduce your exposure to a single egg, stock, or industry, it can help reduce volatility, and reduce your risk of a potentially bad outcome. 

One way to do that is by investing in stocks in several different industries, such as artificial intelligence and technology, the green energy boom, electric vehicles, oil and gas, healthcare, and even biotech. Another way is to invest in different categories of stocks, including large cap stocks, dividend stocks, growth stocks, small cap stocks and value stocks. 

It’s also a good idea to have a few lower-priced stocks in the mix, too. 

Granted, some lower-priced stocks aren’t worth the hassle. Many will fail to live up to investor expectations.  However, there are also hidden gems with long-term potential.  Remember, even Apple, Microsoft, and Advanced Micro Devices were once low-priced stocks.

Here are three more we believe have solid potential, as well.

Hot Stocks Under $10: Editas Medicine (EDIT)

Look at gene editing stocks, like Editas Medicine (EDIT), for example.

By “editing genes,” we have the ability to alter, remove, and even add a DNA sequence to help treat countless disorders we never thought treatable. 

Right now, there are about 7,000 diseases caused by genetic disorders, which occur when a mutation affects your genes, or when you have the wrong amount of genetic material, as noted by the Cleveland Clinic. 

Plus, according to Interesting Engineering, “Thankfully, the growing world of genome editing could be the ‘spell-checker’ needed to detect and eventually fix these.” That “spell-checker” could very well help treat cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurogenerative issues, such as Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.  It may even help with sickle cell anemia, lymphoblastic leukemia, lung cancer, multiple myeloma, Beta thalassemia, etc.  

One of the potential standouts with gene-editing is Editas Medicine (EDIT) – whose EDIT 301 is already seeing positive initial safety and efficacy data for sickle cell disease (SCD) and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia (TDT). 

With Sickle Cell Disease (SCD), for example, the company presented positive initial clinical safety and efficacy data from trials in June. It’s now on track to dose 20 SCD patients in trials by year end. With Transfusion-dependent Beta Thalassemia (TDT), the company already presented positive initial clinical safety and efficacy data from the first patient treated in June. The company is now on track to post additional clinical data by the end of this year.

Further positive data from those studies could have a substantial impact on this sub-$10 stock.

Hot Stocks Under $10: Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX)

Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX) is a clinical stage TechBio company that’s decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery with artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Helping, tech powerhouse, Nvidia just invested $50 million in the company “to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which, in collaboration with NVIDIA, it intends to optimize and distribute to biotechnology companies using NVIDIA cloud services,” as noted in a company press release.

That’s substantial news.

In addition, Recursion will use Nvidia technology to help create AI models and software to discover new drugs. Plus, it may help with the five human trials Recursion is conducting, including a mid-stage trial to treat cerebral cavernous malformations. Even better, Recursion is working on treatments for neurofibromatosis, familial adenomatous polyposis, mutant cancers, ovarian cancers and cancer immunotherapy. 

Here’s what makes AI and drug development even more exciting.

Traditional new drug development has a fail rate of 90%, according to the National Institutes of Health.  With AI and machine learning, failure rates could drop, and the design of drugs could become far easier. Plus, with these tools, we may know exactly which molecules should be used to create game-changing treatments for diseases we never thought were treatable.

In fact, according to Pfizer, “AI could assist pharma companies in getting medicines to market faster. AI today not only does flashy gene-sequencing work, it’s being trained to predict drug efficacy and side effects, and to manage the vast amounts of documents and data that support any pharmaceutical product.”

Hot Stocks Under $10: ChargePoint (CHPT)

Switching gears, keep an eye on ChargePoint (CHPT).

At less than $10 a share, the stock is inexpensive with plenty of catalysts. For one, automakers are racing to build a massive electric vehicle charging network. In fact, according to CBS News, automakers say the new charging network will nearly double the number of quick-charging plugs in Canada and the U.S. Plus, the Biden Administration wants 67% of all new auto sales to be electric by 2032, which will only increase charging station demand. 

Also, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie, “The number of electric vehicle (EV) charging ports in the U.S. is estimated to increase four times from current levels to 18M by 2027,” as noted by Seeking Alpha.

“Tesla and ChargePoint currently dominate the charging ports market, with the former claiming a 61% market share of DCFC ports in the U.S. Meanwhile, CHPT leads with a 46% market share of level 2 ports, which Wood Mackenzie defines as EV chargers with a charge rate between 3 kW and 19 kW of AC power,” they added.

We also have to consider that recent weakness may be a strong opportunity with CHPT.

Analysts at Gabelli Funds has also defended the stock following its earnings-induced pullback. The firm noted that CHPT’s Q1 was positive with revenue coming in at the higher-end of previous guidance. Plus, the company noted it expects to cut its EBITDA loss from Q1 by two-thirds by Q4 of this year. “The negative reaction to the earnings report is likely due to a lower-than-expected 2Q guide, which we think is overblown,” they added.

“Gabelli thinks that as CHPT continues its path to inflect cash flow positive in 2024 the stock will perform well. Of note, Gabelli has a $14 2024 private market value, which represents almost 50% upside from the current price,” added Seeking Alpha.

By Victoria Waldersee

MUNICH (Reuters) -Europe’s carmakers have a fight on their hands to produce lower-cost electric vehicles (EVs) and erase China’s lead in developing cheaper, more consumer-friendly models, executives said at Munich’s IAA mobility show.

“We have to close the gap on costs with some Chinese players that started on EVs a generation earlier,” Renault CEO Luca de Meo told Reuters at the car show, adding when manufacturing costs decline, prices will also go down.

De Meo said as part of the French carmaker’s drive toward price parity with the Chinese, its R5 EV due out next year will be 25% to 30% cheaper than its electric Scenic and Megane models.

Chinese EV makers, including BYD, Nio and Xpeng are all targeting Europe’s EV market, where sales soared nearly 55% to about 820,000 vehicles in the first seven months of 2023, making up about 13% of all car sales.

Xpeng plans to expand into more European markets in 2024, and Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology announced five models for overseas markets, including Europe, over the next two years.

According to auto consultancy Inovev, 8% of new EVs sold in Europe so far this year were made by Chinese brands, up from 6% last year and 4% in 2021.

About 41% of exhibitors at this year’s Munich event are headquartered in Asia, with double the number of Chinese companies attending, including BYD, Xpeng and battery maker CATL.

The arrival of Chinese EV makers in Europe has raised concerns they could dominate EV sales.

“We (Germany) are losing our competitiveness,” said Hildegard Mueller, president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), adding the Munich car show illustrated “how the high pressure of international competition” makes it essential for Germany to invest more in electrification.

The average EV in China cost less than 32,000 euros ($35,000) in the first half of 2022 compared with around 56,000 euros in Europe, according to researchers at Jato Dynamics.

“The base car market segment will either vanish or will not be done by European manufacturers,” BMW CEO Oliver Zipse said on Sunday evening in reference to China’s push into Europe.

Mercedes-Benz will present its CLA compact class and BMW its Neue Klasse, both targeting higher range and efficiency while halving production costs.

Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume told reporters that through its partnerships in China, the carmaker aims to cut battery cell costs by 50%.

Xpeng President Brian Gu said while European carmakers currently lag behind China, they have made a “huge commitment” to EVs with partnerships and large investments in technology.

“I would never discount the large (carmakers) trying really hard to come back and focus on this important transition,” Gu said.

Auto industry analyst Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer said the Chinese are “world champions” at making batteries, which can make up 40% of an EV’s cost.

Chinese battery makers setting up in Germany are helping to lower EV costs and German politicians need to make sure they are “not driven out of the country with stupid decoupling strategies,” Dudenhoeffer added.

($1=0.9273 euros)

(Writing by Nick Carey; Reporting by Victoria Waldersee, Gilles Gillaume Christina Amann, Zoey Zhang and Jan Schwartz; Editing by Friederike Heine, Clarence Fernandez and Sharon Singleton)