By
Svetlana Soroka
April 18th, 2024
Tesla reported much better Q1 deliveries than Wall Street could expect due to the risks associated with coronavirus. TSLA stock is up.
Electric carmaker Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) said on Thursday that they had the best first-quarter performance ever with 103,000 vehicles produced and 88,400 vehicles delivered. This number of deliveries revealed by Tesla was a surprise for many investors. The company also said that its Shanghai factory continued to achieve record levels of production, despite significant setbacks.
The company announced that it will be delivering net income and cash flow results at the same time when Q1 earnings are announced adding that the final numbers could vary by up to 0.5% or more.
For what it’s worth, both numbers beat estimates. Analysts were predicting combined deliveries of 68,674 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, and combined deliveries of 11,234 Model S and X vehicles.
Tesla (TSLA) Stock Is Rising
Though some months ago investors were discussing whether Tesla (TSLA) stock would manage to hit $1,000, today we can’t even dream about it right now.
However, after some bad days, TSLA has started to gain momentum again. Today Tesla stock was growing by 13.96% at premarket selling for $517.90.
At the time of writing, Tesla (TSLA) is up 8.80% and is trading at $494.48. The market cap is $91.04 billion.
Coronavirus Outbreak Caused Temporary Closing of Two Plants
The estimates also took into account the coronavirus outbreak. We all know that Tesla had to dwindle its production at its car plant in the Californian city of Fremont last month. It also had to halt production in Shanghai, but this began already with working normally.
Fremont is still an undecided situation. First, this electric car maker said it plans to operate its Fremont factory, the same day San Francisco’s Bay Area began a three-week lockdown due to the coronavirus spread.
The company then said, “everyone is to work from home, or stop working unless they provide an essential service: health care workers; police, fire and other emergency responders.” Some Tesla workers confirmed that they were told the factory plans to be in operation today but it is still not clear how the company managed to get an exemption.
Tesla’s factory in Alameda county has over 10,000 workers and had said previously that the yearly production will exceed 415,000 units by the fourth quarter. After that, the factory was declared nonessential business during shelter-in-place order which is in place in the San Francisco Bay Area to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Tesla Plant in CA Declared Nonessential Business, Deliveries Growing
According to the county’s sheriff’s office, the plant can keep minimum basic operations through the duration of the directive issued due to the pandemic.
After that, the company kept encouraging its employees to come to work despite authorities in the San Francisco Bay Area issuing a shelter-in-place order over the coronavirus pandemic. In the email, Tesla’s North American HR leader Valerie Workman tells employees that the company has received “conflicting guidance from different levels of government” regarding its Fremont plant in Alameda County. She proceeds to state that all essential employees should continue to go to work despite the Alameda County Sheriff’s office declaring that the car plant is not an essential business.
Be it as it may, without the COVID-19 related shutdowns, the analysts agreed that Tesla could have delivered 95,528 vehicles, including 81,478 combined Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, and 14,050 combined Model S and Model X cars.
This quarter marked Tesla’s first producing and delivering the Model Y, the company’s newest vehicle. However, the company did not break out numbers for sales or production of their space truck.
For the period ending March 31, Tesla said it produced about 103,000 vehicles total, including 15,390 Model S and X, and 87,282 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.