Tesla performance will be imminent What big move will Musk sacrifice to save the stock price?

Financial Associated Press (Shanghai editor Liu Rui) news, after the market on Wednesday, Tesla will release the fourth quarter financial results and hold a telephone performance meeting, Tesla CEO Musk will return to the earnings meeting, and announce the development route of its future products.

After releasing strong delivery data at the beginning of the month, Tesla's stock price once soared to $1200 at the beginning of the month, but then followed the army of technology stocks to open a "falling and falling" mode, as of Tuesday's close Tesla closed at $918.4, roughly calculated, has fallen more than 23% from the beginning of the month high, it can be compared that the NASDAQ fell by 13% in the same period.

Objectively speaking, the reason for the decline in Tesla's stock price has little to do with the company's own operations, but more because of the sell-off tide of growth stocks in the US stock market under the expectation of fed interest rate hikes.

In this context, it is particularly important for Tesla to tell a good story about "future growth prospects" at the performance meeting. After all, even after the big fall, Tesla's valuation is still not low, and it is necessary to emphasize its growth prospects to support the valuation. Therefore, Tesla's future production capacity growth, product route, 4680 battery mass production and other issues will be the top priority of investors.

The Financial Associated Press will pay attention to the Tesla telephone performance meeting and conduct a live broadcast of pictures and texts, please continue to pay attention.

The earnings data is not expected to worry

Although it is a performance call, for investors, the financial performance itself may be the least noteworthy point. After all, Tesla has already released car delivery data for the fourth quarter of the past year, and analysts have already adjusted Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings forecast accordingly.

Earlier this month, Tesla announced that it delivered 308,600 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter of last year, beating wall Street's general expectations and pushing the total number of cars delivered for the full year of 2021 to more than 936,000.

Spurred by strong data, Wall Street analysts have further raised Tesla's 2022 auto delivery forecast from around 1.3 million to more than 1.4 million.

Given the strong data on vehicle deliveries, Tesla's fourth-quarter revenue figures don't seem to worry, but earnings data could still be weighed down by supply chain costs and new factory go-live costs.

Tesla's revenue for the third quarter of last year was $13.76 billion, close to the market expectation of $13.626 billion, but earnings per share of $1.63 far outperformed market expectations of $1.14.

Wall Street's current general expectation is that Tesla's earnings per share will rise further to $2.30 in the fourth quarter, while open financial forecasting platform Estimize is expected to be higher, reaching earnings per share of $2.51.

Investors are most concerned about the issue: how is the mass production of the 4680 battery

On Battery Day 2020, Tesla's 4680 battery continued to receive high attention from the market as soon as it was announced. According to Tesla at the time, the 4680 battery energy increased by 5 times, the mileage increased by 16%, and the power increased by 6 times.

So far, however, Tesla's information about its own 4680 batteries has rarely been revealed.

According to the Nikkei Shimbun reported on Monday, Tesla's main battery supplier Panasonic will start producing new batteries for Tesla in Japan as early as 2023. In addition, LG Energy Solutions also plans to produce 4680 batteries in 2023. However, it is still unknown when Tesla itself will be able to mass-produce 4680 batteries.

On Tesla's official website, the question of "how is the mass production of 4680 batteries progressing" has been the most concerned issue for retail investors.

At Tesla's annual general meeting in October last year, Musk had said that it was producing 4680 batteries at the California factory, with an annual output of 10GWh, and that it was expected that the Texas Gigafactory could mass-produce 4680 batteries by the end of 2022.

Tesla has announced that it expects the first cars equipped with 4680 batteries to be delivered early in 2022.

However, given the continued challenges in supply chain and employment, the mass production schedule of the 4680 may not be optimistic. Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid said, "I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla faces some major challenges in manufacturing, such as the challenge of mass production of new car structures and new batteries." ”

How is Tesla's new car progressing?

Another important issue musk needs to clarify is the question of its future product route.

The first is about progress on Tesla's electric car, the CyberTruck. Tesla first disclosed CyberTruck as early as November 2019, but after several ticket jumps, the latest release of the schedule is the end of 2022 to officially start mass production.

This means that the progress of Tesla's electric pickup trucks has lagged far behind some of its late competitors. The R1T, an electric pickup truck launched by One of Tesla's biggest competitors, Rivian, has gone on the market and achieved good market reviews, GM has also recently launched a GMC Hummer electric pickup, and Ford's F-150 Lightning is also expected to hit the market this year. These products put CyberTruck at increasing competitive risk.

Tesla is clearly already feeling the competitive pressure as well. According to foreign media reports, Tesla overhauled the CyberTruck configuration in October last year, completely abandoning the single-motor entry-level configuration originally scheduled for $39,900 and replacing it with a high-end model equipped with four motors to better compete with the R1T.

There has even been speculation recently that Tesla may already be developing a smaller version of CyberTruck for markets outside of North America.

Another key model underpinning Tesla's growth story is the so-called Model 2. It is said that it will be a cheap compact hatchback that will cost $25,000. At the Battery Day conference in September 2020, the company announced for the first time that it would release the model, which was also seen by Tesla's long-term investors as the focus of Tesla's electric vehicle penetration into the low-end market.