Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

2014 Q4 Earnings Report and Conference Call

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Indeed - and with the latest movements in the stock, I wonder if this could be another short-squeeze of sorts? And what do we expect in terms of more concrete 2015 guidance? Will there be more details on Model X and beyond?
 
Will the delay of the deliveries of the P85D (due to extra tests) result in a lesser total number of Tesla Model S deliveries in Q4 2014? Or will that have no impact at all?

Assuming they get those cars out the door by end-of-quarter, I think it should have minimal impact. They seem to have just been pulled off the line and set aside, while the line continued for other cars.

The big question mark is whether they get those sidelined cars into customer hands by midnight Dec. 31.
 
I figure that the ASP on a P85D is about $24,000 above the ASP for the typical mix, so gross margin is about $8,000 higher. It looks like nearly all the US deliveries in the back half of December will be P85Ds. So, 1,000 deliveries of Ds seems conservative, or $8 MM in extra gross margin. That's a WAG, but should be the right order of magnitude.
 
Total number of Tesla Model S deliveries in 2014 will be in the range of 32,500 - 33,000.

Q1 2014: 6,457
Q2 2014: 7,579
Q3 2014: 7,785

Q1+Q2+Q3 = 21,821

Q4 2014: 11,000 (?)

Q1+Q2+Q3+Q4 = 32,821 (?)

That's 10,344 more than the total number of Tesla Model S deliveries in 2013 (=22,477).

Possible?
 
They will hit the target production wise (an average run rate of 950-1000 cars would do it), but they will struggle to deliver that many cars imho. Some customers won't be able to take delivery in the last days of the quarter, others will have postponed due to the seating issue and a select few will have cancelled. Finding buyers for these 'orphaned' cars and shipping them in a matter of a few days over the holiday season would be quite impressive.
 
there has been exceptions... Last year at Detroit auto show Jerome pre-announced deliveries. And Apr'13, TM pre-announced as well.
Those two instances were associated with surprising news to the upside - the first non-GAAP profit and exceeding production numbers by 20%. So, by that two-deep pattern, an early announcement would most likely be welcome.
 
Since we are using this to maul things over a bit. I feel you should all take a peak over at the estimates being suggested for US deliveries by Inside EVs:

December 2014 Plug-In Electric Vehicle Sales Report Card
2014-sales-chart-Dec-vfinal2-750x522.png


Now the interesting point of note here is not just the suggested 3,500 which would be a huge blowout for December alone breaking all single month EV sales records for the US. And that's great and all but then the shorts would just say: "Yeah, so what, it's the P85D driving the deliveries and demand and a single month doesn't mean demand hasn't dropped off because of how Tesla chunks orders":

Well OK there mister Short. But I request that you do the math on Oct and Nov. I believe you will find that number comes in at 6,000. This in important because this 6,000 number breaks the old single quarter US record for Tesla which was set at 5150 for Q2/2013. Take that Paulo Santos (Yeah, I have been dying to throw that one back in his face finally... and the sweet sweet taste of victory has never felt so good). For those who write SA articles... *nudge nudge* 32no... you should consider a take down piece to blow up his thesis finally. If you will notice, he normally is real quick to write a monthly sales article restating the same data in a different set of numbers that demand has peaked. I think you can make a couple pennies off of this information :D

I know we don't have official numbers yet, and I hope I am not counting chickens before they hatch, but I dare say that all around this quarter should finally put to bed the notion of failing demand. And also keep in mind that the beauty of Oct and Nov is that they don't include ANY amount of P85D sales. So anyone who canceled their orders or otherwise would have shifted out of Oct and Nov deliveries still gave us an all around strong quarter for the US.

With US making up almost half of the needed deliveries to hit targets I feel really great about this quarter. Outside of the seat issues and such which got resolved in time for the December stuff we should have had enough overseas deliveries to cover the remaining half since there was no other major issues at the factory, or am I forgetting something?
 
US demand is roughly twice as high as even the most positive analysis anticipated for in 2012. While Asia/Europe/US were supposed to each contribute 33% to sales, US strength shifts those numbers to 25/25/50 : 17 300 in the US, 8500 in Europe, leaves 7200 cars for the rest of the world to meet 33k. It's going to be tight to meet guidance.
 
"And that's great and all but then the shorts would just say: "Yeah, so what, it's the P85D driving the deliveries ..."
And even if that's true, just goes to show how right Elon was when he said they have aces up their sleeves to stimulate sales if they want to. If a large enough part of that 3500 December number is P85Ds that's going to drive margins/profits through the roof. Q1 should look similar due to P85D deliveries to the rest of the world.

Coming up next? Signature deilveries of the X, again with a high margin. And I am still optimisitc the X will introduce a bigger battery option, probably making the 85 the base model, resulting in a similar rush for Model S P110Ds or whatever they'll be in, say, Q4 2015.
 
CE,

I'm not sure where you get 6000 for Oct. & Nov. Do you mean 6000 for the quarter?

Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear. 6,000 for the quarter.

- - - Updated - - -

US demand is roughly twice as high as even the most positive analysis anticipated for in 2012. While Asia/Europe/US were supposed to each contribute 33% to sales, US strength shifts those numbers to 25/25/50 : 17 300 in the US, 8500 in Europe, leaves 7200 cars for the rest of the world to meet 33k. It's going to be tight to meet guidance.

Do we have all the European numbers? I thought some were still missed last I saw. In either case, I am not too worried China has been doing quite well enough for us and I am sure that this quarter is no different (nevermind HK, Japan, and AU)
 
No, we don't have all the European numbers yet. 8500 estimate leaves some slack for the mainly smaller markets that still need to report. The largest possible surprise at the upside could be if Tesla produced a batch of cars for the British market combined with those for the Australian market.