Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Beck Diefenbach | Reuters
Tesla articled on Thursday that it delivered approximately 88,400 vehicles in the first quarter of 2020, beating expectations. Analysts had believed about 79,900 as of Wednesday, according to a survey by FactSet.
Tesla stock rose more than 17% after hours on the scuttlebutt.
Breaking it down by model, Tesla reported combined deliveries of 76,200 Model 3 sedans and Model Y cross-over SUVs, and integrate deliveries of 12,200 of the older and more expensive Model S and X vehicles.
Both numbers beat estimates: Analysts had awaited combined deliveries of 68,674 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, and combined deliveries of 11,234 Model S and X vehicles, as of Wednesday.
The believes took into account the COVID-19 pandemic, which required Tesla to wind down new car production at its main car put in Fremont, California, in the last week of March and also suspended production in Shanghai in January and February.
Without the COVID-19 reciprocal shutdowns, the analysts’ consensus view was that Tesla could have delivered 95,528 vehicles, including 81,478 related Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, and 14,050 combined Model S and Model X cars.
This quarter marked Tesla’s original producing and delivering the Model Y, the company’s newest vehicle. However, the company did not break out numbers for sales or production of the cross-over SUV.
For the epoch ending March 31, Tesla said it produced about 103,000 vehicles total, including 15,390 Dummy S and X, and 87,282 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.
In the prior quarter, ending 2019, Tesla beat analysts’ expectations on deliveries with 112,000 agencies. The Q4 results also pushed the company across the line to meet the low-end of CEO Elon Musk’s 2019 sales end.
In the year-ago first quarter, Tesla delivered 63,000 vehicles, including 50,900 Model 3 vehicles and 12,100 Copy S and X cars.
Analysts had revised year-end numbers downward
During its year-end earnings call for 2019, Tesla execs told investors it should be talented to “comfortably exceed” 500,000 deliveries in 2020.
CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said, at the time, “For Q1, please keep in mind that the labour is always impacted by seasonality.” He also noted, “We may be temporarily impacted by the coronavirus. At this point, we’re expecting a one to a one-and-a-half week arrest in the ramp of Shanghai built Model 3 due to a government required factory shutdown.”
Tesla has not withdrawn that guidance, consideration the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the deliveries report, analysts who have been historically optimistic about Tesla rectified their expectations for the first quarter of 2020, and the full year, downwards.
One of the lowest first-quarter estimates out there, from Loup Experiments’ Gene Munster, saw Tesla delivering just 57,000 vehicles for the period ending March 31, 2020. Munster underlined that COVID-19 and its impacts on people the world-over have dampened auto sales.
TrueCar estimates that in Procession 2020, U.S. auto sales fell by more than a third versus a year-ago, for example.
Munster wrote, on Peep:
“We see anything above 57k (our bottom-up math) as a directional positive. The Street is at 79.9k after adjusting for the impact of the shutdown. The most high-ranking benchmark will be Tesla’s sequential decline in deliveries vs. the broader auto industry, which we won’t have data on for another month. We feel, even with the shutdown, Tesla will continue to outpace the broader auto industry growth rate by 25-30%.”
JMP Sanctuaries’ Joseph Osha wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday, “Obviously, much has changed for TSLA recently, and with that in form an opinion we revise our model to reflect lower production and delivery activity for 2020.” Osha now expects Tesla to deliver everywhere 433,000 cars to customers this year but sees Tesla returning to form in 2021.
Tesla deliveries typically balk in the last week or two of any given quarter. However, Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday the gathering would not likely notch as many this year.
“While Tesla noted in its production shutdown release that it was diagraming to implement touchless deliveries, we nevertheless would expect Tesla volume to see some impact – especially given the intense weight of sales to California, where a ‘stay at home’ order is in place.”
By contrast, the analyst accurately estimated that product would end up higher than deliveries, coming in around 100,000. He wrote, “Elon Musk noted on March 10 that Tesla had sparked its millionth vehicle. This likely implies that by 3/10 Tesla had produced ~85k units in the quarter, with a weekly output pace in Fremont of ~7,600-7,800 units/week.”