While Ferrari's [NYSE:RACE] cars may have waiting lists stretching out more than a year, it’s a different story when it comes to demand for the automaker’s shares. Ferrari’s share price as traded on the New York Stock Exchange dropped to a new low of $34.03 yesterday before closing the day at $34.98.
That was down $4.95 on the previous close, or about 12.4 percent. More worryingly, though, the price is 33 percent lower than Ferrari’s $52 IPO and as much as 43 percent lower than the $60.97 high reached shortly after shares started trading last October.
The cause for concern among investors is a warning of slowing sales this year, mainly due to the cooling Chinese market where much of the growth for Ferrari has been in recent years. Deliveries in China were down 22 percent in 2015 and are expected to remain flat in 2016. Nevertheless, the automaker still expects record worldwide deliveries of around 7,900 cars in 2016. That’s up 3 percent on the record 7,664 delivered in 2015, which was up 6 percent on 2014’s total.
To spur future growth, Ferrari is expected to add some new, more accessible cars. There’s already talk of a V-6 model arriving in 2019 and we could also see more of the highly profitable special edition models like the recent F12 tdf and F60 America.
Ferrari has a current target of 9,000 deliveries by 2019, and only last month Chairman Sergio Marchionne said he was looking at increasing this target even further. The good news is that Ferrari won’t add an SUV, at least while Marchionne is around. In a conference call with analysts, he said “you have to shoot me first” when asked about the possibility of a high-riding Ferrari.
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