Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said the shutdown of a factory in China and heavy pressure in the supply chain will put an additional brake on the rapid growth of the electric car maker in the current quarter.
However, he sticks to the upward forecasts for 2022 as a whole on Wednesday, while claiming that new, specially designed robots without a steering wheel or pedals will reach production in 2024 and become a “huge engine of growth” for the company.
The comments came when Tesla revealed that it had withstood the worst of the automotive supply chain crisis to generate revenue and profits above most Wall Street forecasts in the first quarter. The news boosted the company’s shares by about 5% in after-market trading, erasing a loss of the same amount earlier in the day.
Tesla said the continuing shortage of chips and constraints caused by the limitations of Covid-19 has hit production and left it with long waiting lists for new cars, some of which extend until next year.
Tesla’s plant in Shanghai was closed under local rules for a few days in March, and Musk said that as the plant is just beginning to resume production, the carmaker’s production in the second quarter is likely to be “roughly on par” with the previous month. This will mark the second consecutive quarter of halted production growth, after an 83% jump in vehicle volume last year.
However, the head of Tesla predicts that the rapid acceleration of new plants in Berlin and Austin will allow the company to overcome bottlenecks and produce “over 1.5 million cars this year”, a higher figure than most analysts expected.
Tesla has postponed the production of new vehicles as its cybercar until next year, hoping that focusing on existing models will allow it to grow faster in new plants. Musk’s promise of robots for 2024 added to the wave of vehicles waiting to go into production, some of which are years behind.
The timing will also depend on whether Tesla can overcome the ongoing challenges of developing its own driving software, although Musk predicts it will finally make a breakthrough by the end of this year.
Musk, meanwhile, acknowledged that the increase in Tesla’s prices at a time when its profits were hitting records risked looking “unreasonable.” But he said long waiting lists mean many cars sold will face higher production costs. “This is our best guess,” he said.
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Tesla’s revenue more than doubled in the last quarter to $ 18.7 billion, or about $ 1 billion more than most analysts’ forecasts, as annual volumes jumped, helping boost some prices to offset more. -high delivery costs. Proforma profits of $ 3.22 more than tripled and exceeded forecasts of $ 2.26.
The results were increased by $ 679 million from sales of regulatory loans, more than twice as much as in the previous three months. Tesla receives loans from some governments to produce more zero-emission vehicles than required by local regulations, and may sell them to other carmakers that produce too little. He warned that credit sales would fluctuate significantly and eventually decline.
Even without credit sales, Tesla managed to raise the gross margin from its automotive operations – the best measure for its core automotive business – to 30% for the first time, up from 29.3% in the last quarter of last year.
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