Elon Musk offered a prelude to the latest exploit of Tesla’s quarterly results (profits + 760% and turnover + 65%) for his part: a tweet satisfied in the same hours of the accounts on what wants to be one of the next, great innovations of the leader in electric and hi-tech vehicles. He revealed that he drove a prototype of his pickup called Cybertruck to Austin which will be produced in the new giga-factory in the Texan city, in charge of churning out the Model Y crossover while waiting for the pickup. Austin, however, has now become the headquarters of the Tesla headquarters. “Awesome,” said Musk, satisfied with the prototype with which he will board a new market segment, vans, which account for a fifth of car sales in the United States.
A fabulous fourth quarter
Also exceptional can be defined the accounts relating to the last quarter, the fourth of 2021, which crowned an entire record year. The very fact that Musk decided to be present at the conference call on the balance sheet – he had previously said he would often skip them – was a clue to the successes he intended to list. Between October and December, the fourth quarter of 2021, Tesla beat. strong forecasts for profits of 2.32 billion, up by as much as 760%, and equal to 2.54 dollars per share. The turnover, with a growth of 65%, was 17.72 billion, 15.97 billion in the automotive sector where the march was 71 percent. Expected earnings per share of $ 2.37 and sales of $ 16.64 billion. For the whole of last year, Tesla reported profits at an all-time high of 5.5 billion, up from 721 million in 2020, and sales of 53.8 billion from 31.5 billion the previous year (the first in surplus).
The supply knot stops new models
However, the company cited supply chain problems as the main “limit” to the business’s running, a challenge that could remain in the current year. Musk in the conference call on the results indicated that, particularly in the face of the chip shortage that today plagues the auto and tech sector, Tesla will not introduce new models this year and that its pickup, initially hypothesized as of the end of 2022, will also have to then wait. After the market, the Tesla stock, caught between record accounts and procurement nodes, lost 3% after gaining 2% during the session. It eventually settled on a fraction of a point drop.
Regularly beaten forecasts
Before now, Tesla had already beaten forecasts in eight of the past nine quarters. And on the eve of the accounts it announced that it had produced 305,840 vehicles and delivered 308,600 in the last three months. Total deliveries in 2021 thus reached 936,172, an increase of 87% compared to 2020, despite obstacles in the supply chain and shortages of microchips. Production pressures are expected to be alleviated by the entry into service of two large new plants, the one already mentioned in Austin and a second near Berlin in Germany.
Title in the spotlight
Tesla, on the financial markets, was recently able to count on a promotion by Moody’s of its credit rating, to Ba1. On the stock market, the stock is down 20% since the beginning of the year, under pressure like many tech stocks in the climate of inflation and interest rate hikes. But it’s still up 7.5% over the past year and since 2020, stocks have more than tenfolded. Its forward P / E, its value expressed as a multiple of its expected earnings per share, is over 115, compared to around 22 for the S&P 500, a high multiple that can expose the group to volatility.
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