Polestar gets new finance chief

Sino-Swedish BEV maker Polestar has appointed Jean-Francois Mady to the role CFO, effective from 21 October. He will be a permanent replacement for temporary CFO Per Ansgar, who will be returning to his role as finance chief of the Swedish arm of China’s Geely, Polestar’s largest shareholder.

Mady has been in the automotive sector since 1999, initially at France’s PSA, followed by its successor, Amsterdam-headquartered conglomerate Stellantis. While largely working in Paris, he has also enjoyed three separate stints working in China at PSA’s joint venture with Chinese OEM Dongfeng, which should prove valuable for a leadership role within a European firm with a material Chinese stakeholder.

Polestar’s new finance chief also enjoyed a brief spell in Thailand in the mid-2010s. Most recently he was senior vice-president of global accounting operations and finance transformation at Stellantis, having worked at SVP level since 2012.

And that wealth of senior-level finance experience may explain his appeal to Polestar, which admitted in May that, owing to not having filed its annual report for the 2023 fiscal year, the company had received a deficiency notice from the Nasdaq exchange.

While it published preliminary unaudited financial and operational results for last year just before a promised end-of June deadline, these included a non-cash impairment charge of c.$450mn relating to Polestar 2 assets and inventory impairment. It only managed to file its Form 20-F annual report in mid-August.

“We are now back on track with our more normalised reporting calendar,” Ansgar told analysts when Polestar reported Q2 results last week. “By that, we have cleared the reporting deficiency we have had with Nasdaq. In the coming weeks, we aim to publish the usual documents, the management discussion and analysis and the IAS 34 report.”

Recruiting a permanent CFO with relevant experience should help to reassure investors that Polestar’s financial compliance woes might be over. But an immediate challenge for Mady and Polestar’s new CEO, another technocrat in Michael Lohscheller announced in late August, is supporting the firm’s share price at over $1/share to avoid further breaching exchange rules.

“We have been trading below $1 for quite some time,” Ansgar admitted on the Q2 call. “The last couple of days, it's been above $1. It was above $1 also earlier in July. So, it is moving around there.

“We have up to early next year to heal this deficiency. Our plan or our ambition is, of course, really to make sure now that, with our increased deliveries and sales on Polestar 3 and Polestar 4, and continued good feedback from customers, you will gradually, during the year, see that this starts to happen that the share price should go up above $1.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, Polestar stock was trading at $1.36/share.