Lilium Lives! – CleanTechnica

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A couple of months ago, I wrote about Lilium running out of money. It seemed the dream had died. After 9 years and nearly 1,000 “preorders,” Lilium just couldn’t make it financially. It’s hard to get off the ground as a startup and reach profitability, even more so in an industry that requires building a new type of passenger vehicle that flies! It’s always been a kind of wild Hail Mary or lottery shot to try to become a successful eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) company. Lilium looked like one of the startups that might make it, but it’d be hard (or crazy) or confidently bet on the company becoming profitable one day.

However, as the headline makes clear, the game isn’t over yet. Another company has come in and saved the day since the news that Lilium had to apply for self-administration proceedings in Germany (in other words, had become insolvent). A last-minute deal with Mobile Uplift Corporation GmbH has the company buying the operating assets of Lilium GmbH and Lilium eAircraft GmbH.

What is Mobile Uplift Corporation GmbH and where did it come from? Reportedly, it is a group of investors from North America and Europe that has united for this purpose.

“The deal, announced this week, effectively rescued the innovative startup from insolvency and liquidation at the last minute, paving the way for Lilium’s two subsidiaries to emerge from self-administration proceedings. The agreement is expected to close within weeks, giving the company a lifeline at a crucial stage,” Autoweek writes. As such, business at Lilium is expected to restart in 2025, and those “preorders” for nearly 800 electric jets may come to life after all — but I’ll come back to those in a moment.

“We are very pleased to announce the signing of an investment agreement with a very experienced consortium of investors, which is a major breakthrough,” Lilium CEO Klaus Roewe said. “Deal closing at the beginning of January will allow us to restart our business.”

Getting back to the issue of Lilium’s “preorders,” as I’ve been summarizing them, this is a mixture of “firm orders, reservations, options, and memoranda of understanding.” According to the news this week, 108 of those are either firm orders or reservations, and another 82 are options to buy more. Those agreements are a little bit more than the loose agreements from different memoranda of understanding (MOU).

It’s still unclear how or when a market for eVTOL aircraft could develop. Could they simply replace traditional helicopters? (That’s a pretty small market.) Could they become common forms of regional travel for rich people? (There are more centimillionaires in the world than most of us realize — 28,420, and that’s more than double the number from a couple decades ago, so we could perhaps expect another doubling in the next couple of decades.) Could they serve some regional commercial transportation services better than existing ground transport or regional aircraft? Who knows? We should find out in the next decade, and we’ll also have to wait to see if Lilium can survive and succeed in whatever market does form for its and its competitors’ small electric jets.