Former £9bn electric vehicle maker Arrival has closed down following the collapse of its sale plan.
All remaining staff – thought to number more than 70 – are to be laid off by the firm which entered administration early last year.
Once hailed as the future of the UK automotive industry, Arrival claimed to be able to produce electric vans, buses and taxis more cheaply via ‘microfactories’ in multiple locations.
The world sat up to listen when US delivery giant UPS put an early order in for 10,000 vehicles, it launched on the US Nasdaq exchange and was briefly valued at £9bn.
However things turned sour and administration followed in early 2024.
An administrators progress report filed on Companies House said that two deals for separate parts of Arrival’s business have fallen through at a late stage due to financing and approvals issues.
Administrators said efforts will now focus on recovering around £87m owed to secured creditors and selling physical and digital IP assets.
At the height of its success in October 2021, Arrival took 198,750 sq ft of space at the CM40 logistics park in Banbury.
A year later it was reported they’d taken another two units totalling 145,426 sq ft as part of its ongoing expansion on eye-watering 15-year leases.
A BusinessCloud investigation in June last year showed how a ‘to let’ board had been erected at the site – but it was the sight of fading, partially-built vehicles seemingly abandoned on the car park that was the starkest reminder yet of Arrival’s fall from grace.
Arrival: The rise and fall of the £9bn electric vehicle maker
Arrival’s launch in 2015 was met with optimism and talk of changing the world.
Arrival UK and its wholly owned subsidiary Arrival Automotive UK were set up in 2015 and 2019, respectively, by Russian billionaire Deni Sverdlov and are owned by Arrival SA, which is registered in Luxembourg.
The early signs were good as it received an order for 10,000 vehicles from the US delivery giant UPS with an option for a further 10,000 as Hyundai and institutional investors scrambled to back the company.
In 2020 Arrival finished top of LinkedIn’s prestigious fourth annual list of top startups.
However things gradually turned sour. There was a fire at its Banbury facility – during a demonstration of one of its vans – in 2022 and several financial setbacks as it struggled to get its designs produced.
In 2023 it announced it would halve its 800-strong workforce and switch production to North Carolina in the United States, while in November it secured £40m in emergency funding as it sought a buyer.
Its shares were suspended from trading at the end of January 2024 and on 5th February the inevitable happened and Arrival’s UK operations went into administration.
Simon Edel, Alan Hudson and Sam Woodward of EY-Parthenon’s Turnaround and Restructuring Strategy team were appointed joint administrators of Arrival UK and Arrival Automotive UK.