Status: 07/27/2021 00:09
Tesla boss Musk has once again shown all skeptics: In the past quarter, the US company delivered more electric cars than ever and earned more than a billion dollars for the first time.
“Technoking” celebrated its 50th birthday four weeks ago. Now Tesla boss Elon Musk is giving himself his best present: the best quarterly result in history. Despite the global shortage of chips and raw material shortages, the electric car pioneer increased sales by a whopping 87 percent to a good 12 billion dollars in the period from April to the end of July. The profit even increased tenfold to 1.1 billion dollars. It was the first billion-dollar profit in a quarter.
More cars delivered than ever before
Tesla also set new records in production and delivery. With over 201,000 vehicles, the tech group delivered more electric vehicles than ever before in a quarter. Tesla produced a total of 206,421 units.
Tesla is not only making profits by selling e-cars. Almost a third of the surplus ($ 354 million) also comes from the sale of emission rights to other car manufacturers. However, this is 17 percent less than a year ago.
Millions of write-offs on Bitcoin investments
The Tesla profit would have been even higher if the electric car maker had not suffered from the volatile Bitcoin exchange rate. The US company had to write off $ 23 million in connection with its Bitcoin holdings. Tesla announced a $ 1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin in February. Musk had initially accepted Bitcoin as a means of payment for electric cars, but then backtracked with reference to the energy consumption for production. In the past week he made another U-turn: his company will “very likely” accept the cyber motto again, he said.
Analysts had expected significantly less in terms of profit and sales. The Tesla shares rose after the hours by 1.3 percent. Since the beginning of the year, the Tesla course has lost around five percent. After reaching a record high in late January, stocks fell to $ 563, but then recovered. Tesla remains the world’s most valuable automaker, with a market capitalization of $ 633 billion.
Grünheide plant remains on schedule
Tesla wanted to comment on the outlook for the rest of the year at an analyst conference later. The company was confident of starting production of the Model Y in Berlin-Grünheide and Austin this year. The SUV crossover model is set to become the best-selling car in the world in 2022. Musk targets 1.5 million models sold.
However, Tesla postponed the delivery of the “semi truck” to 2022 “in order to be able to concentrate better on these factories”. Originally, the US company wanted to bring an electric cybertruck to the market for less than $ 40,000 by the end of the year.
Competition grows
But the pressure on Tesla is increasing. In the USA, Ford is attacking the electric car pioneer head-on with its e-offensive. The second largest US automaker recently announced the F-150 Lightning, an electric variant of the best-selling F-150 pick-up.
And the German automakers VW, Daimler and BMW are also hunting down Tesla. VW wants to replace Tesla on the throne in four years and become world market leader in electric cars. A price war is looming. Tesla has lost market share in the German market. According to calculations by car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, the proportion of battery-only cars fell from 20 percent at the beginning of 2019 to only seven percent.