Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, said that factory closures in China and severe supply chain pressures will add additional drag to the electric car company’s sustained growth in the current quarter.
Still, he clung to bullish predictions for the whole of 2022 on Wednesday, while claiming that a robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals will hit production by 2024 and become a “huge growth engine” for the company.
The comments come as Tesla revealed it has weathered the worst of the auto industry’s supply chain crisis to generate revenue and earnings that have exceeded most Street forecasts. Wall in the first quarter. The news lifted the company’s stock price by about 5% in after-market trading, erasing a similar drop earlier in the day.
Tesla says continued shortages of chips and difficulties caused by Covid-19 restrictions have affected production and left it with a long waiting list new carsome extend into the following year.
Tesla’s Shanghai plant was closed due to local regulations for a number of days in March, and Musk said that with the factory only just starting to resume operations, the automaker’s second-quarter output will likely increase. ability to “equal” to the previous one. stage = Stage. That will mark second quarter in a row Production growth has stalled, after vehicle sales jumped 83% last year.
However, the Tesla director predicts that a rapid acceleration in New factory in Berlin and Austin will help the company overcome the bottlenecks and create “more than 1.5 million cars this year,” a number higher than most analysts expected.
Tesla has stopped making new vehicles like cybertruck until next year in the hope that focusing on existing models will help it scale faster at new plants. Musk’s promise of a robotaxi by 2024 has added to a slew of vehicles awaiting production, some of which are years behind schedule.
Time will also depend on whether Tesla can get past its nagging problems in developing its self-driving software, though Musk has predicted that it will eventually hit a breakthrough by the end of the year. now.
Meanwhile, Musk acknowledged that Tesla’s price hike at a time when its profits are hitting records risks being “unreasonable.” But he says the long waiting list means more cars on sale will face higher production costs. “This is our best guess,” he said.
Tesla’s revenue for the latest quarter more than doubled from a year ago to $18.7 billion, or about $1 billion more than most analysts had forecast, as annual output spike, which raises some prices to offset higher supply costs. Perfunctory earnings were $3.22, more than tripling and topping estimates of $2.26.
The result was an additional $679 million from the sale of regulatory credits, more than double from three months earlier. Tesla receives credits from some governments to produce more zero-emission vehicles than is required by local regulations and can sell them to other automakers that produce too few. It has warned that sales of credits will fluctuate widely and will eventually drop.
Even without credit sales, Tesla managed to raise its auto gross margin — the best measure of its underlying auto business — to 30% for the first time, up from 29. .3% in the last quarter of last year.
