Business: Tesla hits delivery milestone as it closes out contentious year.
Automaker surpasses goal as it exits year fraught with controversy
Tesla said Friday it delivered a quarterly record of 112,000 vehicles during the final three months of the year, which allowed the electric carmaker to surpass Chief Executive Elon Musk’s sales targets for all of 2019.
With its fourth-quarter figures, Tesla ended 2019 with 367,500 deliveries of its Model 3, Model S and Model X vehicles. Earlier in the year, Musk said he expected Tesla to deliver at least 360,000 cars for the year. Deliveries is a term Tesla uses for vehicle sales, and the company considers a sale complete when a car has been delivered and a buyer takes possession of a car.
Tesla said its deliveries rose 50% from its 2018 results.
Gene Munster, managing director of Loup Ventures, said Tesla’s deliveries were “another measurable step forward” for the company, and provide “credibility to the belief that the electric car theme is here today and is opening up a vast addressable market” of potential customers.
Investors, who drove up Tesla’s shares by more than 25% in 2019, showed their enthusiasm for Tesla’s delivery report Friday, and sent the company’s stock price up by almost 3%, to a record-high close of $443.01.
The Model 3 remained Tesla’s most-popular vehicle by a wide margin. Tesla said it delivered 92,550 Model 3s during the fourth-quarter. Tesla also reported a combined 19,450 deliveries of its Model S and Model X cars.
“Deliveries were well ahead of (Wall) Street expectations,” said Colin Rusch, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co, adding that the mix of deliver
ies also looked strong. Wall Street analysts had estimated Tesla would deliver 87,900 Model 3 cars, and a combined 19,100 Model S and Model X vehicles.
Tesla said it produced 104,891 cars during the quarter, including 1,000 cars from its Gigafactory in Shanghai that the company said are ready to be sold. Tesla also said that it has demonstrated it can produce more than 3,000 cars a week at the Shanghai facilty. The company delivered the first Shanghaibuilt Model 3 cars on Dec. 30.