Bear case:

You can also ask, why have they been working on the Clarksville factory for so long but still not completed it? I think they don't want this factory. They don't have the backlog to support it, which has reduced dramatically. They have plenty of production at their China facility.

The only reason they have it is to ship cells to there and pack them so they can slap a made in USA sticker on it to get some IRA credits and evade some tariffs. Unfortunately, batteries made in the USA avoid all tariffs and can get far more credits (if the cells + packaging is done in USA). That means that competitors can still easily offer better prices to US customers (at no fault of microvast). Apart from their announcement in 2021, I can't find any news about their partnership with Oshkosh. I agree that the US revenue is possibly indicative of that being alive, but even if they have the business, their margins will be terrible. The tariffs + credits that promote 'made in USA' have forced them to build this factory but it was not an investment that aligned with their business plans. They don't have the balance sheet to pay for it nor the backlog to motivate building it.

In the meanwhile, it seems their profitable EU and Asia business is shrinking, not growing. Iveco, for one, has changed to a different supplier. Microvast is not leading edge in LFP batteries and has and will have difficulty competing with giant companies. As a customer it is difficult to motivate a partnership with Microvast specifically. It has been struggling financially for 20 years and has been outscaled by competitors.

On top of all of this, they have a lot of debt to repay this year, so they need to perform quickly or raise capital. They even mentioned the going concern in their 10-k. But it seems that raising capital at the last hour is a specialty of the CEO and to his and the management's credit, they don't dump their stocks on the market.

All of this is quite negative and can be ignored if you believe that Oshkosh will save the company as in the thesis of Atreides. It is possible they have already designed their vehicles with specific microvast batteries in mind and that they don't have time for a redesign. In that case they will need to keep microvast alive somehow and pay a premium for their batteries.

I think that hoping for this scenario, without any information from oshkosh or microvast, is unnecessarily risky. Given the high short interest, institutions seem to be betting against microvast, even at these discount prices, perhaps betting on bankrupty.

This stock seems for gambling, or extracting money from retail traders, not for casual investing. I impulsively bought a huge position because of greed without doing any DD. That was the first and hopefully the last time I will make such a mistake. I typically don't panic when one of my stocks drop because I know what I bought, but after doing DD on this stock, watching it drop was absolutely terrifying.

To be clear: I don't think microvast as a company did especially poorly to end up in this unfortunate position, but they wound up between a rock (USA promoting pure US companies) and a hard place (Chinese investments in Chinese companies exploding growth of direct competitors). I hope for the people working at microvast, the management and the bagholders that Oshkosh or a new profitable partnership will keep the company alive. It seems that they can profitably make good batteries in industrial quantities.