Tesla’s
latest earnings miss was having an impact beyond the company.
The electric-vehicle maker on Wednesday reported earnings per share of 66 cents, lower than the 70 cents Wall Street was expecting. What’s more, operating profit margins came in at 7.6%, down almost 10 percentage points year over year.
Along with weak results, Tesla (ticker: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk sounded downbeat on the company’s conference call, lamenting high interest rates and the impact they have on monthly car payments. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the conference call a “mini-disaster” in a report Thursday.
Musk and new Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja both indicated that Tesla’s vehicle price cuts have partly been intended to keep monthly payments relatively unchanged for buyers. “The price reductions we’ve made in, say, the Model Y and you compare that to how much people’s monthly payment has risen due to interest rates, the price of the Model Y is almost unchanged,” said Musk at one point Wednesday evening.
The downbeat report and call have
Tesla
(ticker: TSLA) shares down 6.8% in premarket trading Thursday, after having declined about 5% in regular trading hours Wednesday.
S&P 500
futures were off 0.2%.
Nasdaq Composite
futures traded flat.
That stock drop seemed to spread to Tesla’s Chinese rivals. In Hong Kong trading on Thursday,
BYD
(BYDDF) closed 3.7% lower.
Li Auto
(LI) and Geely (GELLY) posted similar declines.
XPeng
(XPEV) and
NIO
(NIO) finished down 9% and 8%, respectively. In premarket trading in the U.S. Thursday, XPeng was down 3.5%, Li Auto was off 3.3%, and NIO declined 2.4%.
Tesla’s U.S. competitors met a similar fate.
Rivian Automotive
(RIVN) and
Lucid
(LCID) each dropped about 9% on Wednesday and were heading even lower in the premarket.
There is no sign that the EV price war is moderating. Lower prices hurt everyone in the market. While Tesla still boasts a healthy profit margin, others are selling their cars at a loss. They still need to ramp up production and efficiency before they can actually start making money on sales.
Musk also said deliveries of the new Cybertruck won’t significantly contribute to profits for 12 to 18 months and it will take until 2025 to hit a production rate of 250,000 units a year.
“Tesla is an incredibly capable ship,” he said. “Even a great ship in a storm has challenges.”
Write to Brian Swint at brian.swint@barrons.com
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