Fluence Energy Inc. - FLNC

What to make of insiders selling in the wake of an earnings announcement

While pretty much every company will deny it, you have to wonder how well choreographed some of these earnings announcements with lofty “guidance” expectations have to be when they’re immediately followed by a registration by the founders to sell around 15% of their overall holdings.  This filing didn’t happen during the summer when the stock was trading for $30 and the chart was looking fabulous, but rather after a Q4 earnings spike as the chart appeared to be breaking down (I’m not much of a chartist, but that’s my take).  AES and Siemens both hold around 58.6M shares of FLNC stock (though AES holds the super-voting B-1 class) while Qatar Holding owns around 18.5M shares for a combined 136M or so shares out of 180M or so total shares outstanding.  In the 18M share filings, AES and Siemens each filed to sell something over 7M shares.

Last week FLNC announced Q4 results and perhaps more importantly, guidance for 2024 and, as an added bonus, on the conference call basically guided for 2025 as well, and that guidance two-fer was universally cheered by investors (if not exactly by the analyst community).  Shares of the company were trading around $18 in the days prior to the announcement only to surge close to $28 in the days following.  Quite the response for a company that only barely managed to eke out a profit for the quarter while still managing to lose $100M for the year.  And that guidance, when it comes to actual profitability, didn’t really move the needle much on where expectations were prior to the whole announcement.  So let’s take a look at what they said.