Plug Power shares tank 22 percent on accounting error announcement

The hydrogen fuel cell maker revealed that it had spotted the mistakes in a number of recent financial statements.

Plug Power shares took a pre-market trading dive on Wednesday, falling 22 percent following its announcement that it had identified a number of accounting errors released in several financial statements.

The hydrogen fuel cell maker said it would not be able to meet its deadline for its annual report.

Late on Tuesday, ahead of the price tumble for Plug Power shares, the company announced that it wouldn’t be able to meet the deadline of March 16 for releasing its 2020 annual report. It also announced that it would be restating its accounts for the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years in order to correct the errors and would restate accounts for two quarterly filings for 2019 and 2020.

This was a hard hit to the hydrogen sector, which had been experiencing record highs and had been rallying on the faith investors have in H2 as a replacement renewable energy source for fossil fuels in a spectrum of applications. Hydrogen is seen as exceptionally promising in everything from transport to industry.

Plug Power shares had surged by over 1,000 percent in the past 12 months.

This stock price trend made it one of the best performing publicly traded green energy companies. According to the company, the errors in the financial statements were not an issue of misconduct. It also added that those errors would not harm business operations. Instead, it was a mistake regarding “significant judgements” regarding the way in which to apply American accounting regulations having to do with non-cash items such as certain asset impairments.

“Since our founding nearly 25 years ago, Plug Power has prided itself on operating with transparency and integrity, and we are working to resolve this matter quickly,” said Plug Power CEO Andy Marsh. “Importantly, there is no expected impact to our cash position, business operations or economics of commercial arrangements.”

As of the writing of this article, the price of Plug Power shares has been slowly climbing, though it has not yet returned to the type of level it had reached earlier in the week.