Tesla 1st Quarter Sales Disaster


Tesla 4th quarter sales are here. There is some disappointment in the markets. Although I expected sales to decrease. That's why I don't see much of a problem with sales. I thought there might be sales around 400000 this quarter. Wall Street's expectations had started at 470 thousand, and had decreased to 430000 as of the previous day. The figure realized yesterday was below both their expectations and mine. Tesla sold 386000 vehicles. So what happened? Why did Tesla sales drop like that? What does this mean for long-term Tesla investors? What does it mean for short term? I will try to evaluate all of them for you.

Let's take a quick look at the numbers first. In this quarter, Tesla produced 412,376 models of Model 3 and Model Y and sold 369,783 of them. Other models, namely model S, model There are 386810 sales against a total production of 433371 units. My expectation was that it would be just over 400000. Wall Street expectation was last reduced to 431 thousand. Well below both expectations. There is also a detail that they did not present in these reports before. They sold a 4.53 mw energy storage unit, that is, those giant batteries. This is the highest sales in a quarter ever. It's enjoyable in that respect. Well, if we put these numbers on a graph, we see that Tesla had sales below the same quarter last year.

While we sold 388013 vehicles last year, when you collect 369078 model 3 and model Y in this quarter, there is a sales of 17000 vehicles there. There is a sale below them. Of course, the growth story is the reason why Tesla stock is valuable: growth. It's scary when we look at it this way. There is also a decrease compared to the previous quarter. That decline is also quite radical. While it sold 461000 Model 3 and Model Y in the previous quarter, it decreased to 369000 in this quarter. While it sold 22097 other models in the previous quarter, it decreased to 17000 in this quarter. On the other hand, when we look at the sales in the energy chart, this quarter has reached the highest number. But we are slightly above the same quarter as a year ago. So there is not such a big increase there. But there is a significant increase compared to the last quarter and the growth here continues. As you know, Tesla is also building a new factory in this regard. The market did not like these sales. Because the market was okay with a number between 400000 - 430000. Yesterday, the stock markets were not in good taste either. It trails the Nasdaq by around 1.5%. There is a 5.30% loss in Tesla. Although the loss is below what I expected. I will evaluate it a bit.

Now the price of the stock has fallen less than I expected. Because a number below 400000 is actually scary. But the markets don't seem to mind that much, and it's a pretty red stock market overall. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla dropped 10% yesterday. It didn't drop like that, it was around 5%, in fact the business has picked up a little more and is going in that area. Explain the first reason. The statement says that we experienced some problems on the production side during this period. The problems we are experiencing on this production side are not issues under our control and are a transition related issue. Therefore, there were delays in the shipment of orders. The first of the problems is that the production of the new Model 3 has started in the United States. They announced the new model 3 highland production in the 3rd week of January and started production and they said that there will be certain stops in our factories for this to start production.

Because, as you know, production lines need recalibration. This has an effect. The second is the terrorist attacks in Yemen in the Red Sea. As you know, he stopped the shipments. Because of this, the Berlin factory had to cut production for a while, and then the transformer of the Berlin factory was attacked by environmentalists in the region. They burned the transformer. The factory again had to stop production for a few more days. It is very difficult to know how much these hit total production. But serious stuff. Because Tesla already has three factories producing cars, one of which is in China. In China, Chinese New Year takes place in the first quarter. There is about a week's holiday there. Its production in Germany was stopped both due to the Red Sea and the fire, and finally, we do not know how much production loss there is in America due to the ramp up of the new Model 3. The market relaxed a bit because of this. Because yes, at first glance, it is a frightening number. Despite 433000 production, 386000 deliveries and around 45000 cars are in the inventory. Or is it because Tesla's sales have dropped? This may not be the case, but because Tesla increased its prices this quarter. In fact, as of today, all models in the United States and Canada have increased by around $1000, and Tesla would typically make very panicky discounts when its sales were bad, but it did not make such discounts. In fact, prices generally increased in this quarter.

So where does this break come from? Probably, with these production stops and starts, the balance between deliveries was disrupted. Because remember, Tesla ships the vehicles from these three factories all over the world and does not send them to dealers. Tesla sells these vehicles directly to customers through its own shops. The vehicle was delayed, the customer may have switched to another brand at that time, or the customer was about to get a loan at that time, but the loan was postponed because the vehicle did not arrive. Such delays may have occurred. These are shipped by ships. If these production delays accumulated towards the end of the quarter, vehicles may have accumulated in ports, Tesla's showrooms, and Tesla's factories, due to the delay in reaching the main production capacity. Because this accumulation spoils everything. In other words, when there is a disruption on the production side, it is quite possible that this will disrupt the shipping schedule. After all, remember, we are talking about a quarter. There are 12 weeks in total and around 75 days of time to produce and ship, and Tesla didn't come away from the previous quarter with much inventory.

Let's remember the numbers from the previous quarter. There were sales of 494000, production 484000. So the inventory it delivers from here is very, very small, around 10000. This corresponds to Tesla's 2-3 day sales. Tesla did not take over much inventory here as we entered the new year. Therefore, the supply chain interruptions experienced in the middle of the quarter may have caused problems in the company's vehicle delivery. Therefore, I think that the difference between 433000 and 386000 will be sold very quickly in the second quarter and I predict that sales will increase in the second quarter. Normally, second quarters are always better than first quarters. The first quarter is the worst quarter of the year in the automotive market. On top of this, remember that tax deductions were abolished in Germany. This happened in the first quarter. There is a problem with the economy in China. I'll talk about BDN sales a little later. There are big surprises there. In this context, these events do not seem very abnormal to me. So it would have been better if it was over 400000. But I think there is no fatal number here, and I think we will regain last year's pace in the second quarter and return to the growth curve.

But the fact is that Tesla needs to step on the gas a lot to exceed its annual 2 million target in the remaining three quarters. I am not sure whether there is an economic environment to press this gas. Because, as you know, interest rates have not fallen yet. The latest reports from China show that there is relief in the economy, but there are still problems in China. When all these come together, the 2 million target this year is a bit difficult. In this context, I thought Wall Street would be harsher on the stock yesterday, but it did not. The main reason for this is what is happening on the autonomous driving side. And the numbers from BYD. When we look at BYD, it sold 300000 cars in the last quarter. Tesla 386000 cars. If you remember, BYD's electric vehicle sales surpassed Tesla's in the last quarter of last year. Now Tesla is ahead of BYD again.

By the way, this decrease in sales on the electrical side of BYD also tells us that there is a real problem in the Chinese market. Because remember, the majority of BYD's sales still occur in China. As of now, Tesla has once again become the world's top selling electric car company. The increase in sales in the energy unit is 4.2% compared to last year and 26% compared to the last quarter of last year. This place is pleasing. I think it will accelerate here too. Because an additional factory is coming into operation in Texas. But obviously these are not my main topic. My main topic is still Tesla's developments in autonomous driving. They released version 12.4 and there is a significant change. Previously, this software was called Beta. Beta means experimental version. Now it says supervise. In other words, he is saying that this is not a beta anymore, he can take this vehicle to most places by himself. But you still need to supervise. So you need a director. He says we are not yet at fully autonomous driving. Those who use it are very impressed. The gentleman at the head of autonomous driving tweeted that "it is the beginning of the end." This has been commented on quite a bit.

An engineer was transferred to Tesla from Google's Vimos, another autonomous driving company. He was an important engineer and that engineer said, "I can't believe what I saw at Tesla." He said that you will accelerate a lot in the coming days. Elon Musk made it obligatory for sales teams to test fully autonomous driving to customers during the delivery of Tesla cars. This may be slowing down sales a bit in the meantime. Because the teams were delivering the product before, you were leaving. Now there is training, a test drive, etc. In addition, every new Tesla car purchaser is given the right to use fully autonomous driving free of charge for a month, in America and now I think they have expanded it to Canada. Here we see that Elon Musk and the Tesla team have increased their confidence in fully autonomous driving.

Elon Musk was already saying this. What prevents us from fully autonomous driving is our GPU, our operating capacity. As soon as that was completed, it looks like they received the necessary chips from Nvidia. Elon Musk tweeted about this and said that we got rid of the bottleneck there. So we learn much faster now. Tesla's autonomous driving no longer requires coding. Self-learning tools from Neural Network. For this reason, very fast versions are coming one after another and customers are very happy with them. I'm looking at him. Because if autonomous driving is approved, Tesla has tremendous growth models to create. Of course, I am not happy with this quarter's sales. I would be much more satisfied if it was over 400000. But it's not a matter of life or death. A long-term investor will not be discouraged by such things. I don't spoil it either.

I believe Tesla second quarter sales will be very good. But I think the most important thing is that fully autonomous driving will be finished by the second quarter of this year. Of course I could be wrong. In my eyes, there is nothing wrong with Tesla. It's moving on and we'll forget most of the noise being made in the second quarter. We will say that we were talking about these in the third quarter and the fourth quarter. Of course, this is a prediction and never investment advice. It is quite possible that I am wrong, I am just telling you my own position. I continue to steadily increase my long-term Tesla investment.

The information, comments and recommendations contained herein are not within the scope of investment consultancy. Investment consultancy services are provided within the framework of the investment consultancy agreement to be signed between brokerage firms, portfolio management companies, banks that do not accept deposits and customers. The comments in this article are only my personal comments and these comments may not be appropriate for your financial situation and risk return. For this reason, investments should not be made based on the information and comments in my articles.

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