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%.

Comments

Not seasonality that cause sequential Q rev drop

[JoeyRox]

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.

Re:Tesla is a fraud

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:Tesla is a fraud

[cheesybagel]

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.

They're largely filling preexisting orders

[SlaveToTheGrind]

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.

Re:They're largely filling preexisting orders

[sphealey]

- - - - - 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). - - - -

Thoughtful and informative post. There are two factors that might be added to the list:

* Having driven an electric car (Volt) for six months now IMHO electrics are superior to ICE for 80% of USian use cases (and to me more enjoyable, but that's a matter of preference)
* The US alone spends about a a half-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year subsidizing the oil industry with everything from drilling credits to Superfund cleanups to military garrisoning of the major oil producing regions of the world, so the market for ICE vehicles is not exactly undistorted.

Thanks for the analysis

[Okian Warrior]

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.