re: Diving Deeper on Origin Materials?

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Are you still confident long term in this stock?

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That's taken a big hit in the past few hours. I knew O2 would be delayed until 2026 or later, but management seemed very scatterbrained on the call just now and the powerpoint quality for the earnings update was very lackluster. It's unclear what the strategy is, these wild pivots to biofuels and FDCA without much explanation don't come off as credible. Old assumptions were for $1.1B capex and $400M of EBITDA for the O2 plant, new assumption is for $1.6M capex and $280M EBITDA, so clearly a major reduction downward.

IF this is an abandoning of the plan to build their own plants and go 100% to licensed plants, then that's a great strategy and frankly what I would do if I was CEO. But, they can't say that really yet until they ink licensing deals. I don't know how much of the ~$10B in offtake reservations is now for products that won't get made.

Not gonna lie, a disaster of an earnings call. I still think the tech could work but have much larger doubts about management now. I will not sell down here in the $2's, it'll probably see a dead cat bounce over the next month or so into the $3's and then I'll reassess.

Analysts on the call were rightfully furious at the management team for this big a shift without a good explanation for it.

Looking back, I got really lucky on SLI making all that money and then blew a small chunk of it on a biotech stock and may have blown a decent chunk of it on ORGN at this point. Thankfully I was mostly in money markets and SpaceX. Assuming this never recovers, it will be the last pre-revenue stock I ever invest in.

Best case scenario is O1 plant product starts shipping later this year and customers like the technology and we can get some licensing deals going. They maybe one of their customers will buy Origin out at a decent enough premium so that we aren't bagholders anymore.

The only path forward is licensing now. If they can't license, they'll go bankrupt. But if they can do multiple licensing deals with SCGP/Indorama and others, it could be a massive return from these levels. I just don't know what odds to ascribe anymore to those scenarios.