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Tesla still lost $800 million this year and has never had a profitable year, on both record car sales and record regulatory credit sales. What about that indica
by xkjkls 7y ago
Tesla still lost $800 million this year and has never had a profitable year, on both record car sales and record regulatory credit sales. What about that indicates sustainability?
- trhway 7y ago$800M loss on $25B sales (which are growing YoY while R&D actually resulting in new models and features is maintained stable) is a noise at this point.
- neosat 7y agoAgree. Given the growth numbers and their market leadership in the EV area, there's a strong case to be made that this 'loss' is more of an 'investment' to set up for future revenue growth and consequently profits that come with increasing maturity and operational cost reductions.
- xkjkls 7y agoThey have shrunk in sales YoY in the US and Norway, their two largest markets. They managed to grow globally by finding the most advantageous subsidies for them to take advantage of. However, even that only gave them 1% growth of the past year.
- woodandsteel 7y agoThe low growth was because of production problems and because they maxed out their single factory. Now they have another factory producing and a third under construction. As to subsidies, governments are pushing ev's harder and harder. The EU has continually-increasing fleet standards that can be met only by adding more ev's, and China has continually increasing ev production standards. Ev sales are going to keep increasing, and Tesla makes the best ev's. Sales, revenues and profits are going to keep going up.
- xkjkls 7y agoWhy were they able to meet a run rate or 500k cars a year in Q4 of last year and not sustain it if their factory was maxed out? And why would they claim in projections that their factory was capable of producing that if they didn’t meet that? Companies are rarely production constrained. Many claim they are, but the fact that Tesla sales in their two largest markets declined doesn’t indicate to me that production is their number one issue.
- woodandsteel 7y agoAt 500k per year they were still nowhere near meeting global demand, and they decided to move sales away from markets they were already well-established in, and into new ones. The nice thing about this disagreement we are having is it will be settled by what happens in the next year. I say Tesla's sales will go up strongly now that it has another factory. I take it you think they won't, and all that new capacity will go unsold.
- xeromal 7y agoYou're spot on with everything. I think the biggest hitch this year will be China. That is such a huge market
- xkjkls 7y agoAgain they produced 367k, not 500k, like they claimed they could. If they could produce 500k, why claim they could, and why didn’t they? And I would say Tesla’s revenue growth will start to flatline, yes, as the last two quarters have shown.
- woodandsteel 7y agoTheir production capacity increased in every quarter. By the end of the year it was at a 500k per year rate. And it is continuing to go up rapidly, now that it has a new factory.
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- xkjkls 7y agoR&D isn’t even meeting depreciation though. Either these factories are some how never before seen in accounting history or this company is underinvesting in its futures
- zaroth 7y agoActually there’s a third option which has been discussed on their financial calls. Their capital efficiency has markedly increased. To put it less glamorously, they burned boatloads of money chasing “alien dreadnaught” style fully automated production, and after recognizing that failure (better late than never) they now find they are able to build out new production lines at a fraction of the first line’s cost.
- xkjkls 7y agoMaybe. My bet is that they have been underinvesting in order to meet financial results, and that that will catch up to them. Looking at other financial statement history, this seems like a safe bet.
- optimiz3 7y agoOur TSLA brokerage accounts thank you and your /r/RealTesla brethren for your sacrifice.
- woodandsteel 7y agoBecause it has overcome the problems that lead to the losses, and it is set in a number of ways to be highly profitable this year and into the future.
- xkjkls 7y agoThis company has been unprofitable for ten consecutive years as a public company. That’s a record. I’ll hold my breath on people saying the future will be different.
- rjdagost 7y agoThis is what a speculative bubble looks like. Enjoy popcorn on the sidelines until people start pricing in financial reality. Manias sometimes take a while to fizzle out. Year over year revenue growth is actually flat to slightly negative for the past 2 quarters. If top-line revenue growth continues to stall out, that's often a catalyst for corrections.
- xkjkls 7y agoYeah, it will be hard for Q1 to be as bad as last year, but it doesn’t look pretty from there.
- jussij 7y agoThe financial results from the link don't show a $800 million loss for this year. From that document in the FINANCIAL SUMMARY section there are these quarterly profit/loss number: Income (loss) from operations Q1-2019 Q2-2019 Q3-2019 Q4-2019 -522 -167 261 359 So for the first half of the year Tesla did lose 689 million dollars. But for the whole year that was only a loss of 69 million dollars. I think what the market likes is the Tesla cash position. If you look at those it would appear Tesla is no longer burning cash. Cash and cash equivalents Q4-2018 Q1-2019 Q2-2019 Q3-2019 Q4-2019 QoQ YoY 3,686 2,198 4,955 5,338 6,268 17% 70% The fact that the year on year cash position grew by 70% would be pretty comforting to shareholders.
- xkjkls 7y agoYou’re using non-GAAP numbers. By GAAP standards, they lost $800 million
- blaser-waffle 7y agoLOL, it was ONLY ~$70 million. How does this stack up to last year, and forecasts for next year? If they were in the hole $120MM last year and now only 69, with forecasts for ~20MM or less next year then there is a clear road to profitability and I might be willing to do the Long thing.
- lazyjones 7y agoHere's a different opinion: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/29/business/tesla-earnings/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/29/business/tesla-earnings/i...
- xkjkls 7y agoUsing non-GAAP numbers. Non-GAAP gives you substantial lee-way to not charge things to your bottom line. I don't think you get to claim to run a profitable business just because you started paying your employees completely in stock.