I’m writing this sitting in the same yellow walled office that I presented and shared our vision, dream, and hard work at EMCSA six months ago.
Since then a lot has changed and yet some things have remained the same.
Firstly with giving this update and sharing what we’ve been up to, I want to go back to April of this year.
We started talks with Tier 1 auto suppliers and manufacturers, the goal was to form a partnership that would oversee the development and manufacturing of our vehicles here in South Africa and Western Europe.
But by May, partnership talks fell apart and we decided to put our partnership on ice due to strategic differences.
While this was going on, we were still focused on raising the seed-round that would see us complete the development and building our almost production-ready prototypes.
Due to a number of inquiries, we lowered our minimum share price and worked on a crowdfunding campaign for exactly this.
But then in June, we got an investment and development partner that would fund the whole round and I made the decision to not go ahead with the crowdfunding campaign.
I decided that it would be beneficial to us as a team to close the cap raise ASAP and start work on the platform and complete prototypes.
But then that on its own took longer than expected. A month turned into two, then three, and then now.
Looking back now, maybe we still should’ve done both and not completely changed our plans but adjusted. I take that full responsibility as a leader of our organization.
As result we have lost some of our best engineers to larger auto companies and even motorsport organizations, which really speaks to the talent we had, still have, and can attract.
Currently, now we are working with two companies from Europe who have decades of automotive know-how and experience.
This partnership will see us develop and start production by 2023 instead of the 2024/25 time we had originally planned.
This does mean though that we won’t be using our fully in-house developed platform but one we work on with our development partners.
With this partnership will start production with two models, the Bakkie and an SUV with another sports model a possibility as well but this will be manufactured outside South Africa.
This last quarter we will be formally announcing our partnership, the SUV design, and work on the platform will be shared as well.
We are excited to be back, with a strong bold strategy and development partners we can trust and build a long-lasting legacy with.
Thank you for your support and I appreciate it, see you all in Twitter space next week.
Love you all.