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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.
Tesla is a fraud. It is Theranos...
How so? Are they not electric cars? Do they not function as cars?
but they make explosive electric cars.
Electric cars do not explode, Tesla or otherwise. In the event a damaged battery cell, a cascade reaction can occur in which the battery slowly burns the car but never explode. However, ICE cars have been known to explode because they are powered by a combustible fuel source and a collision can cause the gasoline to leak. When the leaking gasoline meets a small ignition source the vehicle is soon engulfed in a fireball.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
You might argue about the financial viability of Tesla or it's business model but even their competitors think their product are solid technology wise for what they are.
What they have are manufacturing and quality control issues.
It is not surprising they missed their target deliveries this quarter. Their logistics system is dysfunctional. Since deliveries this quarter were mostly for European and Asian markets, i.e. where the remaining high-end customers still to be served are, this made it even worse. Did you catch the news about a bunch of Model 3's stuck in customs in China some a couple of weeks back because of a labeling issue? Or how Elon made Tesla employees personally deliver vehicles to customers to meet their numbers? Those are just some of the issues. Their logistics suck.
As I've said before, the hundreds of thousands of people on the Model 3 waitlist means you can't view an increase in deliveries as an equivalent increase in customers. They're simply backfilling orders that already existed, so the 110% growth is just measuring increase in production. Depending on the rate that people on the waitlist are giving up and moving on, net customer demand could actually be decreasing.
The real test will come when the waitlist is eliminated -- then QoQ or YoY will actually measure deltas in customer demand.
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.
Yes. 1Q19 demand was pulled into 4Q18, and at the moment they still have thousands of units on ships in transit to China and Europe, effectively pushing those deliveries into 2Q19. So last quarter in particular was a low point in deliveries.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Tesla's cars are real and do work. Some idiosyncratic design choices but that's between the seller and the potential customer.
What it is not clear that Tesla has is a successful business model sustainable for more than... about the amount of time it has been in business. Historically it has always been possible to launch a new luxury brand, but having satisfied the demand from their intial customers it has also been very easy for the new luxury brand to go out of business and most have. GM, Nissan, and some other established makers are now selling electric vehicles that might eventually reach price points affordable by the masses, but Tesla does not seem able to do that.
What they have are manufacturing and quality control issues.
Yes, there are manufacturing and quality control issues, but those are not the only challenges. The current talking points attempt to pivot away from the elephant in the room, which is that Tesla's largest market may be trending toward saturation, hence the emphasis on Europe and China. Part of that potential decrease in demand comes from the sunsetting of the US federal tax credit. However, if some of that decrease comes from saturation of the potential market, then that is a big concern. The practical short-term addressable market is only a small subset of the total car market due to cost (i.e., a huge part of the market won't consider even a $35k car), availability of charging infrastructure (e.g., how do renters charge at home?), high cost of electricity (e.g., most people don't have access to free solar or at-work chargers), and range anxiety to a lesser but non-zero extent.
It is not surprising they missed their target deliveries this quarter. Their logistics system is dysfunctional. Since deliveries this quarter were mostly for European and Asian markets, i.e. where the remaining high-end customers still to be served are, this made it even worse.
This is the part that suggests that the US market is trending toward saturation, at least for the high-end, high-margin customers. If Tesla could sell more to the US market instead of the more costly operation of selling overseas to new markets, they would do so. The overseas markets can wait in deference to easier, short-term profits, if those profits were available.