Tesla's continuous price reduction strategy over the past year has not created a larger market for Tesla, so much so that Musk had to say that sales growth will slow down this year, and 2024 is destined to be a difficult year for Tesla.
Tesla's 2023 financial report shows that Tesla's annual profit has declined for the first time since 2017, and the profit in the fourth quarter fell by 40%, revenue and earnings per share fell short of expectations, and the stock price fell 5% after hours. In 2023, Tesla's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) were $16.6 billion, down 13% from $19.2 billion in 2022.
However, it is not all bad news, with a total revenue of 967 in 2023US$7.3 billion, an increase of 19% year-on-year. A total of 18080,000 new cars, a year-on-year increase of 38%, of which the Model Y sold more than 1.2 million units worldwide, becoming the world's best-selling model.
Tesla's core business, the revenue of the automotive segment was 824$1.9 billion, accounting for 85% of total revenue, up 15% year-over-year. Tesla's energy division, which sells solar power generation and energy storage systems, saw a 54% increase in revenue in 2023, contributing 60$400 million in revenue, services and other revenue increased 37% year-over-year to 83$200 million. Overall, the auto business no longer achieves a growth rate of about 50%, and it is barely in line with expectations in terms of revenue, but from the perspective of Tesla's ** meeting, 24 years are much more low-key than last year.
An informal Morgan Stanley survey of Tesla's institutional investors found that many are bearish on Tesla, with almost everyone believing that Tesla's stock price will underperform in 6 months, and most believing that Tesla will underperform in the next 12 months.
Adam Jonas, chief analyst at Morgan Stanley Automotive, said in a note on Wednesday that investors cited several reasons for the overall bearishness, the biggest of which was artificial intelligence and Tesla's exclusion from AI-related technology stocks**. Jonas believes that Musk is "marginalizing" Tesla from the AI theme, actively mentioning the deterioration in demand for electric vehicles.
In the past, Tesla bulls may have favored extreme valuations given Tesla's huge growth story, but revenue growth has fallen sharply and EPS is expected to be largely flat in two years. Even Tesla's long-term supporter "Sister Wood" also sold Tesla's ** sharply last year, although she said that it was just a "routine position adjustment", but the sell-off of more than $58 million still made many investors feel uneasy.
The bigger problem is that the sharp price cuts over the past year have limited growth stimulus and have not preserved profits.
In January 2023, Tesla officially announced a price cut - the maximum reduction of Model 3 and Model Y is 360,000, 480 thousand. In the quarter of the price cut in China, Tesla's global deliveries increased by 36% year-on-year4%；Global deliveries surged 83% in the second quarter; In the following two quarters, the growth rate fell all the way below 20%, and the marginal utility of price reductions has been reduced to zero. To make matters worse, the gross profit margin on vehicle sales fell below 20% in the four quarters of 2023. 6%。
In January 2024, Tesla fired the "first shot" of the ** war - Model 3 and Model Y** were lowered by 6,500 yuan to 15,500 yuan. After the adjustment, the Model 3 starts at 24590,000 yuan, Model Y starting at 25890,000 yuan. In addition, Tesla's official website also announced that the Model 3 rear-drive car insurance subsidy and low-interest financial policy, the total discount is as high as 220,000 yuan.
It's not that the market is too Tesla, because Tesla has been too brilliant in the past few years. For the full year of 2023, Tesla's revenue will be 967$700 million, a year-over-year increase of just 19% – the lowest level since 2019. Tesla's annual profit also saw a rare decline – something that has also never happened in the last 7 years.
On February 20, it was reported that an account posted on the social platform that it met Tesla to transport new cars, saying that "Tesla's goal of producing 10 million to 20 million cars per year is not a question of 'can', but a question of 'when'" In response, Musk responded: "It will be a very difficult climb to reach 10 times the output." It can be done, but the workload is huge. Such a response is a bit less Musk, after all, Musk has always been an optimistic practitioner and believes that pessimism is worthless.
If you follow Musk's dynamics last year for a long time, Musk has indeed become a little "sentimental". Tesla's guidance is too vague, saying that it is between the massive increase in scale and profits brought about by the global sales of the Model 3 Y and the second wave of Tesla's next-generation platform models, so Tesla's vehicle production growth rate in 2024 may be significantly lower than in 2023.
Judging from the available information, as Tesla's main business, it will not have new models in 2024, and the Model 2 and Model Q have been denied before. Roboxi, which Sister Mu thinks is enough to change the world, will most likely not be launched in these two years.
The Cybertruck is still in the ramp-up stage of production capacity, and due to the complex process and manufacturing process, especially the large use of stainless steel body, the Cybertruck's production capacity and cost are difficult to reach the level of the Model 3 Y, and its high production cost has directly affected Tesla's profit performance in the fourth quarter. Due to the higher-than-expected difficulty in production, the final starting price of the Cybertruck is more than 50% higher than what Musk proposed at the time of its initial launch.
Although the Cybertruck has more than one million orders, the current production capacity still makes Musk very cautious. Musk believes they have the capacity to deliver about 250,000 Cybertrucks in a year, but according to Tesla's plan in the earnings report, the Cybertruck will only produce 1250,000 units is almost half.
It is rumored that the cost of the models produced by the new generation platform will be only half of the current one, that is to say, the same model, after the new platform is put into production, the price may be only half of the current one, so that Tesla below 200,000 yuan will really become a reality.
But the arrival of the next generation of models will not be until the second half of 2025 at the earliest. Although Musk has repeatedly emphasized that the next-generation platform will be cheaper and more popular, he has not disclosed key information about the model, such as the vehicle's performance, appearance, production process or unveiling time. He simply said that they had made considerable progress.
New platforms often need to adjust supply and demand, and it generally takes a quarter or two for production capacity to ramp up, and even if Tesla does a good job of bridging up, it may not be until 2026 for new cars to be launched in large quantities. This is not good news for Tesla, which has not adopted a multi-brand strategy and has aging products.
To say that Tesla has completely lost its aggressiveness in new energy vehicles and lost its market sensitivity is really misunderstood.
At Tesla's investor event, Tesla's engineers have said that the new generation of permanent magnet motors will no longer use rare earth materials, and will have better permeability and thermal stability, while reducing material costs by about 30%.
Tesla is also developing a new all-solid-state battery technology with the goal of increasing battery energy density and reducing battery costs. This new battery technology will use a solid-state electrolyte instead of a liquid electrolyte, which is capable of increasing the energy density of the battery by about 30 percent while improving the safety and longevity of the battery.
In addition, Tesla is also developing a new body structure technology called the Independent Body-Bearing Unit Structure (IPU). The technology will use independent load-bearing units to support the weight and impact forces of the vehicle, while reducing the number of body parts and assembly processes, thereby reducing production costs and increasing production efficiency.
However, Tesla's Chinese counterparts have also made certain achievements in solid-state battery semi-solid-state batteries, and have their own advantages in integrated die-casting, wire-controlled chassis technology, and intelligent driving. If Tesla's next-generation platform has a difficult ramp-up, there is a real possibility that the market rules will be rewritten in two or three years.
When someone asked Musk what he thought of BYD's pure electric sales surpassing Tesla, Musk said that Tesla is not a car manufacturing company, but an AI and robotics company. Of course, there are different opinions on how to view Tesla's attributes, but AI and robots have always been the direction of Musk's efforts, and he is working to turn Tesla into such a company.
OpenAI's first generation model SORA. As long as you enter the prompt word, you can generate 1 minute of high-definition**, which is regarded as a new king bomb technology that rewrites the entire **generation field, triggering a market carnival.
But Musk is not convinced, and bluntly said on the X platform: Tesla has the best real-world simulation and ** generation capabilities in the world!
People who don't know may think that Musk is taking advantage of the heat and promoting his own products. But Tesla was able to generate real-world ** about a year ago, and it is accurate to physics. But it's not very interesting, because all the training data is coming from the car, so it also looks like it's coming from the camera on the Tesla vehicle, although this is a dynamically generated rather than a recorded world.
In July last year, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Tesla's self-driving software, mentioned in a speech at CVPR2023 that Tesla is building a basic world model for its AI technology. For example, for the same section, the model can ** the evolution of the surrounding environment in the future under the two conditions of "continuing to go straight" and "changing lanes to the right".
When Musk demonstrated his own generation ability this time, he also admitted that the current computing power for FSD training is not enough, so he did not use the ** generated by the model for training.
In general, SORA and FSD take different paths, SORA generation has indeed reached a new height, but there is still a distance from commercial use, and FSD can be maturely applied in intelligent driving. There should not be only one way to the future of AI, whether it is generative reality or simulated reality, it has its own problems and application scopes, and over-touting and betting on the head is not a good thing for the development of the industry.
Given that Musk has been sparing no effort to promote his own large model Grok since last year, many investors are worried that Musk will put too many computing resources in XAI, and even cut Tesla from it for AI, which is likely to lead to the reshaping of Tesla's value. However, this concern is unlikely at the moment, because FSD and GRAK, as well as robots, have considerable commonality, and there is not much need to operate separately and independently.
In the past year, car companies have been able to fight the best war, and one of the main reasons is that the cost has been reduced. Among all the parts of a new energy vehicle, the most expensive is the battery, and the most important raw material for the battery is lithium carbonate, and the cost of lithium carbonate directly determines the cost of building a car.
Founder ** has made a calculation, taking the standard version of the BYD seal model as an example, when the lithium carbonate ** drops from 500,000 tons to 100,000 tons, the bicycle will release 0930,000 yuan cost space. However, Tesla's strategy of exchanging price for volume last year did not work very well, which is why Tesla sold 500,000 more cars in 2023 than in 2022, but Tesla did not make more money. This year, the situation has worsened, last year's "998 Qin let the market shock" this year, "798 Qin directly swept Liuhe", many competing and non-competing products are following the price reduction. When ZEEKR 001 cut prices last year, Lin Jinwen, vice president of ZEEKR, said that the scale of sales is more important than the pursuit of gross profit margin, and it is necessary to reduce prices to accelerate the expansion of market scale.
In the past, Tesla faced a global market with low penetration, and now even Tesla's home base, electric vehicles in the United States, have experienced a considerable decline, and the new subsidy policy and high inflation environment have led to a lot of problems on Tesla's sales side. This is not that Musk can reactivate the market by reducing costs alone.
Overall, 2024 may still be a year of high input and low output. Of course, these high investments in the long term correspond to the establishment of Tesla's longer-term competitiveness barriers, and Tesla's long-term logic is not broken, but the short-term market's pricing ideas for the linear extrapolation of Tesla's performance are likely to face the highest pressure.
The market doesn't like the "conservative Musk", but that geek Musk has always been freewheeling, and it is not the first time that he is inconsistent with the market goal.
Reference: The car rim ** battle, almost can't be moved **fixed focus.
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In 2024, Musk will have to sleep in the factory again ** Superelectric Laboratory.
Tesla shareholders are bearish on Tesla **U.S. stock investment network.