Tesla misses quarterly revenue expectations amid fears of slowing demand
Tesla’s third-quarter revenue fell short of Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, prompting its stock price to drop more than 4% after markets closed.
The company posted $3.3bn in profit and $21.45bn in revenue. The results come two weeks after the electric carmaker said it produced 22,000 more vehicles than it delivered, signaling to some analysts that the company was not able to maintain demand.
But the company’s chief executive Elon Musk, who said during the earnings call with investors he received many questions about demand, remains optimistic.
“I can’t emphasize enough we have excellent demand for Q4 and we expect to sell every car that we’ve made,” Musk said. “The factories are running at full speed and delivering every car we make.”
The company attributed the delivery shortfall to transportation issues and said in its earnings report that it was becoming increasingly expensive to secure capacity to transport its vehicles.
Wall Street had expected the company to report $3.9m in profit and $21.96bn in revenue on Wednesday. While the company fell short, its financial results do show that Tesla was able to recover from its shaky second quarter of 2022 when it saw a drop in profit after a shutdown of its Shanghai factory and production slow downs.
“We’re looking forward to a recordbreaking Q4,” Musk said during the call.
Musk hyped up Tesla’s long term potential, saying it could eventually become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined, two of the most valuable companies in the world. It won’t be easy, Musk conceded.
The company’s board is also reviewing the possibility of buying back $5bn to $10bn worth of stock next year, according to Musk, which would entail Tesla using cash to buying its own stocks to return capital to shareholders.
While some analysts remain bullish about Tesla’s growth, they caution that the company needs to be careful about how much it increases the prices of vehicles given the wider economic slowdown.
The company said that while each of its factories saw record production, that “supply chain bottlenecks” including battery supply chain constraints “remain immediate challenges”.
The results also come as Musk nears a deal to buy Twitter, which could require him to sell more of his Tesla shares to fund the purchase.
Musk said he was excited about the potential Twitter deal, though he thinks he and other investors are “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”.
“Obviously it’s a product I know really well and it’s an asset that has sort of languished for a long time and has incredible potential,” Musk said. “The long term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value.”
Some experts don’t think the market slowdown, or the Twitter deal, will hurt Tesla’s position as a leader in the electric vehicle industry.
“The market will prove challenging, as it has for all [automakers],” said Alyssa Altman, head of transportation and mobility at the digital transformation consultancy Publicis Sapient. “Inflation is high, energy bills in Europe are increasing and China’s economic slowdown is impacting the rest of the world. The competition is heating up and Tesla will need to work to keep its aura. Nevertheless, short-term losses due to market forces and supply chain realities will not stop Tesla from continuing to be the top market competitor in the EV space.”