Getaround (NYSE: GETR) stock jumped 102% on the news that they'd purchases the assets of Hyrecar. One - entirely unkind no doubt but entirely possible - description of this is to double down on failure. The peer to peer car sharing market hasn't proved wholly viable for anyone at all. So, to merge two such operations can be seen as that doubling down on what no one has been able to make work.
On the other hand there is also the issue that everything works at a price. If you can pick up assets cheaply enough then there's a margin to be made from sweating them. It all then depends upon what is cheap enough?
As background Getaround started some 15 years back and was, as with Uber, Lyft and so on into the ideas of rentals, peer to peer car usage and so on. The difference was that Getaround went toward the rental side of things rather than the taxi. Yes, new tech did make different business arrangements possible but the major break in the market is between vehicles supplied with a driver and those that were rented - or shared - to be driven. Getaround went that second route.
Getaround stock price from NASDAQIt hasn't been successful. Don't forget that Getaround came to market via a SPAC merger only in December 2022 and the stock has lost 96% of its value since then. OK, a little less with today's rise but still.
We'd also suggest, from the look of that stock price premarket today, that the excitement about this merger/purchase is fading already. It might well be that the price being paid is low (a little over $9 million) but perhaps not low enough?
As we've noted before the Getaround stock price is highly volatile on no news at all. So the possibility that it might overreact to actual news is also there. We'd suggest that this excitement is likely to fade away. At least until there's solid evidence that the combined companies will be able to do what neither have done individually - successfully crack the market at margin.
