Tesla just released its report for the fourth quarter of 2022 on how many cars were made and delivered.
Total deliveries Q4 2022: 405,278
Total production Q4 2022: 439,701
Total annual deliveries in 2022: 1.31 million
Total annual production 2022: 1.37 million
Tesla says that deliveries are the best way to estimate sales. These numbers set a new record for the car company run by Elon Musk and showed a 40% increase in deliveries from the year before.
But the numbers for the fourth quarter fell short of what analysts had hoped for.
As of December 31, 2022, a group of analysts’ predictions put together by FactSet showed that Wall Street expected Tesla to have sold about 427,000 cars in the last three months of the year. Estimates that were updated in December and were part of the FactSet consensus ranged from 409,000 to 433,000.
These more recent estimates were the same as a company-made consensus that was shared by Tesla’s Vice President of Investor Relations, Martin Viecha. This consensus was put out by electric vehicle industry researcher @TroyTeslike. It said that 24 sell-side analysts thought that Tesla would deliver an average of 417,957 cars in the third quarter (and about 1.33 million deliveries for the full year).
This year, Tesla started making cars at two new factories in Austin, Texas, and Brandenburg, Germany. It also increased production in Fremont, California, and Shanghai, but it doesn’t say how many cars it makes or how many it ships to each region.
Tesla said that it delivered 388,131 Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers in the fourth quarter of 2022. It delivered 17,147 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs in the same time period.
In its third-quarter shareholder presentation, Tesla said, “Over a number of years, we expect vehicle deliveries to grow by an average of 50% per year.” The rate of growth will depend on how much equipment we have, how often our factories are up and running, how efficient our operations are, and how big and stable our supply chain is.
Tesla had problems during the time period ending on December 31, 2022. Covid outbreaks in China caused the company to temporarily stop and cut production at its Shanghai factory.
During the fourth quarter, Tesla cut prices by a lot and ran other promotions in the U.S., China, and other places to boost sales, even though this could hurt its margins.
Elon Musk recently sent an email to Tesla employees asking them to “volunteer” to deliver as many cars as possible to customers before the end of 2022. Musk also told employees in his email not to be “bothered” by what he called “stock market craziness.”
In the last six months, Tesla’s stock fell by more than 45%.
In December, a number of analysts were worried that demand for Tesla’s electric cars, which are more expensive than a growing number of hybrid and fully electric cars from competitors, was falling.
Along with competitors like Ford and GM and newcomers like Rivian, Tesla is set to benefit this year from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which gives incentives for making and buying fully electric cars in the United States.
Analysts and individual shareholders both said that a “Twitter overhang” was partly to blame for Tesla’s share price drop in 2022.
Musk sold his shares of Tesla last year for billions of dollars to pay for a leveraged buyout of the social media company Twitter. The deal was done at the end of October. Musk made himself CEO of Twitter, and his big changes to the company and its social media platform have caused a lot of trouble.
In the last few days of December 2022, Tesla’s stock started to rise again as investors got ready for record deliveries in the fourth quarter and for the whole year.
