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Shares of QuantumScape Corp. rallied more than 5% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the battery-maker startup reported a wider-than-expected loss in its first quarterly reporting as a public company, and said it will build a test plant in California.
QuantumScape QS, -7.32% said it lost $695 million, or $2.41 a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter, compared with a loss of $14.3 million, or 6 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter.
QuantumScape is a pre-revenue company. Analysts polled by FactSet expected a loss of 6 cents a share in the quarter.
The company announced it has decided to build a “pre-pilot line facility” in San Jose, Calif., which it dubbed QS-0.
The plant “is intended to have a continuous flow, high-automation line capable of building over 100,000 engineering cell samples per year,” QuantumScape said. The goal is to have the plant producing battery cells by 2023, it said.
Additionally, the company said it expects to lease a second building in the second half of 2021.
QuantumScape, founded in 2010, went public in November through a blank-check company. In December, it released performance data on its solid-state lithium-metal battery and said, among other highlights, that based on company tests, their battery cells showed the ability to charge faster.
The company said it plans to spend between $230 million and $290 million in combined operation and capital expenses. It would enter 2022 with more than $900 million in liquidity, “sufficient funding, we believe, to fund us through first production,” it said in a letter to shareholders.
