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Tesla misses on earnings, reports another profitable quarter


Employees work at the Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai, east China, Nov. 20, 2020. U.S. electric car company Tesla in 2019 built its first Gigafactory outside the United States in the new Lingang area, with a designed annual production capacity of 500,000 units.

Ding Ting | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images

Tesla reported earnings after the bell and it’s a miss on earnings but another profitable quarter for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and solar business.

Shares initially dipped after hours by more than 6% on the news and quickly began to rebound.

Here are the results, versus what analysts were expecting according to estimates compiled by Refinitiv:

  • Earnings: 80 cents adj. vs $1.03 per share expected
  • Revenue: $10.74 billion vs $10.4 billion expected

Tesla’s gross margins reached 19.2% in the fourth quarter of 2020, the lowest since the last quarter of 2019. Capital expenditures hit $1.15 billion for the quarter, and Tesla reported positive cash flow for the quarter and the full year of 2020.

Tesla previously said it had delivered 499,550 vehicles in 2020, falling barely shy of its guidance for half a million vehicle deliveries in 2020. (Deliveries are the closest approximation of sales numbers disclosed by Tesla.) It produced 509,737 vehicles during the year.

Both deliveries and production numbers set a new record for Elon Musk’s maturing electric car company, seen as a triumph in a year when auto sales and factory operations were dampened by a global pandemic.

Starting around the end of 2019, Tesla has said that it expects to report positive cash flow and net income moving forward, with possible exceptions around the launch and ramp in production of new products or facilities. Last quarter was its fifth consecutive quarter of profitability — which led to the addition of the company to the S&P 500.

Tesla is currently building new factories in Austin, Texas, and Brandenburg, Germany, after quickly constructing and reaching a high volume of production at its last new plant in Shanghai.

Vehicle sales in China largely enabled Tesla to hit record deliveries in 2020. So did the introduction of a new crossover SUV, the Model Y, which Tesla began to produce in serious volumes in the first quarter last year out of its Fremont, California car plant.

By the period ending in September 2020, Tesla was making more Model Ys than Model 3s for US drivers, according to NHTSA records on light vehicle production. The company has not historically broken out sales numbers by region, or precise model. Instead it combines sales of Model Y and 3, and Model S and X.

Since Tesla’s third quarter earnings call in October 2020, the price of the company’s stock has more than doubled, giving it a market capitalization of more than $835 billion and making it the fifth-most valuable company in the U.S.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.



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