The Tesla Strategy
Tesla’s 3rd quarter financial results have been posted - and while the raw numbers aren't as high as certain institutions had been expecting, Tesla remains the top EV manufacturer in the world - and has set themselves up to widen that gap in 2024.
On the face of things, Tesla’s 2023 numbers for manufacturing and selling have taken a slight dip this quarter - 435,000 units or so, sold and shipped. This is lower than earlier projections from Wall Street by a small margin - but Tesla doesn't care, and neither should we.
Even the company's stock took barely a couple of hours to rebound from the slight dip resulting in the Q3 news - and it's because Tesla and its investors already knew this was going to happen - they even warned the public about it, so it's weird that Wall Street didn't adjust their estimates.
The real reason for the slight dip in performance of course is that the company has spent most of this year building new facilities, upgrading existing ones, and redesigning part of their fleet - all while prototyping the new Cybertruck, the vehicle that seems to be galvanising an already incredibly loyal customer base.
And that’s why no one paying attention is at all concerned by this slight stumble - if a dip of about 30,000 units sold front he last quarter could even be called that when Tesla is moving almost half a million cars per quarter lately.
Tesla is outstripping every single one of its competitors in the EV space - no one comes close.
According to some S&P Global Mobility Data, news outlet Reuters has compiled some pretty wild charts showing that in the USA, Tesla outsold it’s closest EV competitor - Chevrolet - by almost 300,000 units. That’s just a laughably wide margin.
Courtesy: Reuters
And aside from updating most of their facilities to continue this crushing domination of the private electric vehicle market - Tesla also has a leg up on electric commercial vehicles.
During the ongoing Run on Less EV Trucking study, Tesla’s class 8 Semi was able to make a 1,000 mile journey in one day. That sort of longevity goes a long way to showing that electric tractor trailers can begin replacing their diesel counterparts - something that a recent study on electrifying transportation suggests more important than getting private drivers to make the switch.
This is mostly why quarterly reports aren’t a great indicator of the trajectory of a company. It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to Tesla this year that they’re preparing for a huge surge in popularity. And their work with the Tesla Semi, their power storage systems, and the adoption of their NACS charging tech are diversifying what the company makes money from.
Contrary to what economists want, number cannot always go up - and making investments for the future sometimes means having a leaner couple of months so you can do even better for the next few.
Which makes it all the more incredible that Tesla is destroying their competition - even while suffering a slower sales quarter.