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Tesla Deliveries Are Down 31% From Last Quarter -- But Up 110% From Last Year (forbes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:
Tesla's stock dropped 8% Thursday on the news that Q1 deliveries fell 31% from the previous quarter. However, being a seasonal business, car companies usually compare their results against the same quarter from the previous year. On that basis, virtually all of the major car companies have said Q1 sales will be flat to 7% lower than last year. In contrast, Tesla's deliveries are up 110% from last year. From the one year perspective, Tesla is the only car company that is growing...
Yesterday's headlines which focused on the 31% decline are factually correct but misleading. Moreover, Tesla said that delays in deliveries to Europe and China caused "a large number of vehicle deliveries to shift to the second quarter. At the end of the first quarter, approximately 10,600 vehicles were in transit to customers globally..." Had Tesla managed the increased deliveries in Europe and China a little better, they might have come close to Wall Street's expectations.
On Friday, Tesla's stock bounced up 2.68%.
Yesterday's headlines which focused on the 31% decline are factually correct but misleading. Moreover, Tesla said that delays in deliveries to Europe and China caused "a large number of vehicle deliveries to shift to the second quarter. At the end of the first quarter, approximately 10,600 vehicles were in transit to customers globally..." Had Tesla managed the increased deliveries in Europe and China a little better, they might have come close to Wall Street's expectations.
On Friday, Tesla's stock bounced up 2.68%.
It was the expiration/reduction of consumer tax credit. A huge amount of demand was pulled forward in the final Q of last year for that reason.
It's not the same thing. Theranos advertised a product which they never actually delivered. That they could do a variety of blood tests with a small blood sample which they did not.
Tesla sells an actual product that does work as advertised.
Thank you for posting that. I was wondering where the mislead was, since all the recent expert analysis seemed reasonable and rational.
In case anyone hasn't been following the Tesla saga (most people, I imagine), public sentiment about the company is completely and totally driven by a sense of profit for the customers of the people writing the sentiment. If a fund's customers would profit by the stock tanking, then they try to bring that about by writing misleading predictions of doom and gloom.
The Tesla target price is all over the map - from from a low of 180 to a high of 500.
Tesla used to be the most shorted stock in history, and still has significant short interest. Roughly $11 b is betting that the stock will tank, and this results in enormous incentive to bring that about.
Last summer it was "Tesla will need another round of financing, we're certain", then Tesla paid its debt obligation in cash from profits.
Last month it was "Musk violated the SEC agreement", by tweeting information that was available in the published documents.
Today it's "interest has dried up". Wait a half a year and see if the trend is correct.
It's completely insane that the value of the company stock is based not on analysis and solid numbers, but on the perception of numbers. The stock doesn't go up or down based on whether they make a profit - it goes up or down based on whether it meets or exceeds *expectations* of profit.
Ugh!
It's literally impossible to get good stock information about Tesla at this point, and this will probably be true going forward for several years.
Thing is, it's not really customer demand per se. California has a ZEV mandate. Each year, every car company has to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though there's at least one hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in the mix. The formula is a bit complex (factoring in partial ZEVs like plug-in hybrids), but for 2018 it's about 2.5%. For 2025 it'll be 8%.
If a car company can't hit that quota, they must buy credits from a company which exceeded theirs (usually Tesla, so you can nix all the conspiracy theories about the other automakers wanting to kill off Tesla - Tesla is their safety net). If they fail to meet their ZEV quota, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt California's auto guidelines, they'd be banned from selling cars to about a third of the U.S.population. No car company wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market, so they are all busy producing EVs. And if there's insufficient demand for EVs for them to meet their quota, they will run sales and incentives (even selling/leasing the EVs at a loss) to meet the quota.
So the growth in customer demand isn't organic. It's mandated by law (that's a fact too). Not saying there isn't demand - there very well could be. But we'll never know exactly how much real demand there is because the law manipulates market forces to make the tail wag the dog (forces automakers to lower the price until a certain level of demand is attained).
And the only non-factual part of this post. Speculation: Tesla may be deliberately trying to slow down production, so they can push more of those preorders into later years when the ZEV mandated percentage is higher. They may be hoping that the other companies will have a harder time hitting the higher quota percentages, which would make Tesla's ZEV credits more valuable. Right now, once all the automakers hit their ZEV quotas, the ZEV credits for any additional cars Tesla sells that year are worthless.