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Bloomberg

EV Company With Almost No Revenue Posts 3,000% Gain in 8 Months

(Bloomberg) — There is nothing about the finances of Blink Charging Co. that would suggest it’s one of the hottest stocks in America.It’s never posted an annual profit in its 11-year history; it warned last year it could go bankrupt; it’s losing market share, pulls in anemic revenue and has churned through management in recent years.And yet a hot stock it is. Investors have bid Blink’s share price up 3,000% over the past eight months. Only seven stocks — out of about 2,700 that are worth at least $1 billion — have risen more over that time. The reason: Blink is a green-energy company, an owner and operator of charging stations that power up electric vehicles. And if investors are certain of one thing in the mania that is sweeping through financial markets, it is that green companies are can’t-miss, must-own investments of the future.No stock better captures this euphoria than Blink. With a market capitalization of $2.17 billion as of Monday, its enterprise value-to-sales ratio — a common metric to gauge whether a stock is overvalued — has blown out to 481. For some context, at Tesla Inc. — the darling of the EV world and a company with a very rich valuation itself — that number is just 26.“Everything about it is wrong,” said Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research. “It is just a cute name which caught the eye of retail investors.”Citron was one of a handful of firms that bet against Blink last year, putting on short-sale trades that would pay off if the share price fell. It’s one of several wagers against stocks favored by the retail-investment crowd that have gone against Citron — with GameStop Corp. being the most high-profile — and prompted Left to declare Jan. 29 that the firm was abandoning its research into short-selling targets. Overall short interest on Blink — a gauge of the amount of wagers against the stock — has fallen to under 25% of free-floating shares from more than 40% in late December.For the short-sellers, one of the things that raised alarms is that several figures tied to Blink, including CEO and Chairman Michael Farkas, were linked to companies that ran afoul of securities regulations years ago.Farkas dismisses this and the other criticisms lobbied by the shorts. “There have been and always will be naysayers,” Farkas said in an email. “When I founded the business, the naysayers questioned whether the shift to EV was real. Now, as the value of our business grows, the naysayers tend to be the short sellers.”Also See: Bloomberg Intelligence’s Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance DashboardIn the CrosshairsMaking money on charging is, historically, a losing proposition. In theory, a model like Blink’s that involves both equipment sales and collecting user fees could become consistently profitable as government support accelerates EV adoption. But no one’s done it yet.“This market is still too…