"This is the last time I'll attend a Tesla earnings call, unless there's something very important to announce later." On the 2021 second quarter earnings call at the end of July last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk left us with such a summary.
Therefore, when Musk confirmed that he would participate in the fourth quarter and annual financial report meeting in 2021, the world began to look forward to this Tesla year-end summary meeting.
After all, Musk has repeatedly blown the wind on social media, saying that he will announce the next New Tesla Product Road Map at the meeting.
Will the Cybertruck pickup, Semi heavy truck and Roadster supercar be clear on delivery time or even early on the market? Will the legendary $25,000 entry-level new car be officially on the agenda? These are all eye-catching suspense.
However, if you, like me, beat jet lag and get up from bed at 5:30 a.m. on the 27th to listen to this earnings meeting, the impression that can be left in the sleep-deprived brain will still be "the greater the expectation, the greater the loss."
Without mentioning specific data and information, let's flip out the fourth quarter earnings report of Tesla in 2020 and 2021 for comparison.
In the 2020 documentation, the first picture behind the various financial statements is the following:
The C protagonist in the first picture of the 2021 document has changed from a little harsh livia white wolf to an assembly line worker who is honestly screwing screws in Tesla's California factory.
The two pictures have very different styles, which also sets a tone for Tesla's fourth quarter 2021 financial report: there is no cool product information, only pragmatic talk about realistic revenue and future production.
Musk's participation is more like a platform celebration for Tesla's excellent achievements in 2021 - after "denying N-connection" of new car planning and delivery time, it continues to use advanced technologies such as autonomous driving and humanoid robots to stir everyone's nerves.
The world's most profitable car company: net income of 100 million yuan per day
"2021 is a breakthrough year for Tesla. The market viability and profitability of electric vehicles should no longer be doubted. Tesla deliveries increased by 87% in 2021, and we achieved the highest quarterly operating margin of any production OEMs, which already shows that electric vehicles are more promising than fuel vehicles."
This is the conclusion of the first sentence of the main text of the financial report. The central idea is still to tell everyone that Tesla is currently the most profitable car company in the world.
If you want to make money, on the one hand, you can sell more cars, and on the other hand, you can get a lot of gross profit for each car you sell.
Starting with the fourth quarter, Tesla's total global deliveries reached 308,650 units in the quarter, up 71% from 180,667 units in the same period last year.
More than 300,000 new cars were sold worldwide in one quarter, a figure that is not unusual for traditional car companies. What is more noteworthy is how much revenue and profitability these new cars can generate.
In the fourth quarter, tesla's automotive business gross profit was $4.882 billion, up 118% from $2.244 billion in the year-ago quarter.
In the fourth quarter, Tesla's gross profit margin for new cars was as high as 30.6% – keeping this number in mind, this is where Tesla claims to be the most profitable car company. Previously, the industry generally believed that the highest gross profit margin of traditional fuel vehicle companies was about 10%.
For the full year of 2021, Tesla's total global deliveries are fixed at 936,222 units, an increase of about 87% year-on-year.
While China's new power manufacturers are still struggling to deliver 100,000 units per year, Tesla has begun to attack the million mark.
In terms of full-year revenue, Tesla's total revenue in 2021 reached $53.823 billion. Among them, the total revenue of the automotive business was $47.232 billion. Total gross profit across all operations was $13,606 million, with a total gross margin of 25.3%.
In terms of net profit, Tesla reached $5.519 billion for the whole year of 2021, or about 34.76 billion yuan, close to a net profit of 100 million yuan in 1 day. The highest since its listing was the first consecutive year that Tesla achieved profitability.
Looking back at Tesla's revenue structure for the full year of 2021, we can clearly see that the proportion of the automotive business is getting higher and higher.
Tesla is becoming more and more like a "serious car seller" company - in the fourth quarter, Tesla's carbon emissions credit revenue was only $314 million, which can basically take off the hat of the "charcoal seller" that was once questioned.
In addition, Tesla's current global sales are basically in a "production-sales balance": the total production volume for the whole year of 2021 is 930,422 units, and the total delivery volume is 936,172 vehicles. Basically, as much as you can produce, you can sell as much as you want, and the average inventory cycle in the global market is only 4 days.
For 2022, Tesla expects deliveries to continue to grow by more than 50%. Comparing the above data, the way to achieve this goal is also very clear: increase production capacity and produce more new cars.
Can "China Speed" be reproduced?
Based on the projected growth of more than 50% of annual deliveries, tesla factories need to expand annual production capacity of nearly 500,000 units next year. To achieve this goal, it is simple and simple, and it is difficult to say.
It's simple because judging by the number of factories on the books, achieving this goal in 2022 should not be too difficult for Tesla.
At present, Tesla has a total of 4 factories around the world, two in its hometown of California and Texas. The other two, one in Berlin, Germany, and the other in Shanghai, which we are familiar with.
In the earnings report, Tesla's description of these factories is as follows:
The Fremont, Calif., plant peaked in capacity in 2021. At the same time, the plant's annual production capacity potential is expected to eventually reach more than 600,000 units.
The Shanghai plant currently has an annual production capacity of more than 450,000 units. Local production in China has played an important role in ensuring the stability of Tesla's global supply chain and reducing the cost of bicycles, and will continue to serve as Tesla's main export hub.
The Berlin plant in Germany began commissioning and product production validation at the end of 2021, but it still needs to wait for the local government to finally produce the license before delivering the new car to the European market. At the same time, the first vehicles produced at the German plant will continue to use the 2170 battery.
At the same time, the capacity plan of the Austin, Texas plant is not clear, and it is still in the equipment commissioning stage. In the table, we can also find that the factory's subsequent production focus will be model Y and electric pickups Cybertruck.
But on the call, Musk revealed some new information about the production of the Texas factory: the first Model Y equipped with the latest 4680 batteries is expected to roll off the production line in the first quarter of 2022 and be delivered.
Although Tesla held a grand opening ceremony for the Berlin factory at the end of last year, the difficulty of government approval is still much greater than the technical problems when the factory will be able to start.
In contrast, the post-planned Texas plant may even achieve "curve overtaking" and start production before the Berlin plant.
In fact, this also reflects the difficulties faced by Tesla's current capacity climb: the construction of factories and plants is only the first step, and the subsequent processes, equipment commissioning, supply chain guarantees and even the impact of the new crown epidemic will bring uncertainty.
Is it intriguing to recall the "China Speed" leap that the Shanghai factory once achieved?
Therefore, at the earnings report, Musk also clarified the plan to have a new factory: it will begin to select sites around the world, and it is possible to announce relevant news this year.
In fact, the news of Tesla's new factory has a long history. From the seemingly unreliable Indian factory to the Qingdao factory, which was officially debunked by Tesla China, speculation has long been emerging.
If you were Musk, where would you want to build a new factory?
Musk's "Seasoning"
Although it was previously announced everywhere that it would disclose future new car plans at the earnings conference, Musk finally left a tone of "Tesla will not launch a new car this year".
His explanation for this is: "If we are going to launch a new car this year, then the total production will be reduced." At a time when demand for Model 3 and Model Y is soaring in the global market, ensuring the capacity of existing models and focusing on supply chain and production optimization are tesla's most important issues.
Immediately after, Musk began to disappointingly deny N-Liga:
Cybertruck pickups, Semi heavy trucks, Roadster sports cars will not be listed in advance and will continue to jump tickets. Among them, the Cybertruck, which has recently been exposed on the Network, can only be delivered in 2023 in the ideal case.
When asked what exactly is the cause of Cybertruck's difficulty, Musk somewhat surprisingly said that it is not the lack of capacity of the 4680 battery, but that "pricing and what consumers are willing to pay for the new technology" is the main issue.
"The biggest question is actually how to make Cybertruck affordable?", he said.
Compared with the current situation of endless competitors for electric pickup trucks in the US market today, Tesla seems to have returned from the dimension of technology research and development to the dimension of marketing, and more pragmatically considered the design problems of Cybertruck.
However, Musk still gave a clear production capacity expectation for this cool pure electric pickup truck: the annual output will reach 250,000 units. In this way, Tesla does not seem to have paid much attention to competitors such as F-150 lightning and Rivian R1T.
As for the fabled cheaper, nearly $25,000 entry-level model, Musk also said, "No, there is so much work to be done at the moment, rather than developing a cheaper new car, it is better to focus more on the development of the fully autonomous driving system FSD."
When I hear this sentence, I wonder if China's electric vehicle manufacturers will secretly breathe a sigh of relief?
▲"Model Q" hypothetical image
Of course, even without a new car, Musk will certainly not give up a good time to sketch a blueprint for Tesla's various leading smart technologies.
Regarding the FSD Beta system currently being tested, he said that nearly 60,000 Tesla models have been tested in the United States. When the time comes in 2022, it will be rolled out to all models equipped with the system worldwide.
But we also know that Musk's new FSD system, which has been "infinitely close to manual driving", has also been jumping tickets in the past. Whether it can really be officially pushed this year, or that sentence, everyone listens to it.
Finally, for the Dojo supercomputer and humanoid robot Tesla Bot, which was grandly unveiled at AI Day last year, Musk's words also brought new news:
Dojo will be officially operational in the summer of 2022. However, this amazing supercomputer with amazing computing power is not a necessity to achieve automatic driving, and its greatest significance is to use it to reduce the cost of research and development of autonomous driving technology and improve research and development efficiency.
Also, remember the incomprehensible humanoid robot Tesla Bot on AI Day? Musk said it was "the most important product that is currently under development, probably more important than the automotive business."
Sometime in 2022, Tesla will launch a Prototype Tesla Bot code-named Optimus, whose first use case could be "moving parts or other items around the factory."
Will there really be images of human workers and robot workers screwing together in the Tesla factory in the future? Let's wait to see if this is a "satellite" that Musk has put again, or whether it will actually become a reality.
Write at the end
The above is the most important content of the 2021 Tesla financial report, and the core information is summarized as "new cars and new technologies are slowed down first, expand production capacity, promote production, and sell more cars and make more money in 2022 is the most important thing."
But back in this year's Chinese market, the new models that we can see with the naked eye can be said to have already been dazzling. Continuing to rely on the two "old cars" of Model 3 and Model Y, can Tesla continue the sales glory created in 2021? And what means will be used to maintain their competitive advantage?
Let's look forward to giving us an answer to this question from the actual market feedback.
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