Contrarian trend to push Musk to the richest man throne, why tesla is not afraid of the "lack of core tide"?

* Text/Spades with long sword

For Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the recent event has been a double happiness.

On the Forbes Global Rich List released on April 5, the "Iron Man" once again topped the list with a personal wealth of $219 billion, leaving beetls, Gates, Buffett and other competitors far behind; almost on the same day, one of Musk's favorite social platforms, Twitter, appointed him a board member and will serve as a Class II director until 2024.

Of course, it's all in Musk's plans: Earlier, he bought 9.2 percent of Twitter's stake, worth $3.672 billion, which makes him Twitter's current largest outside shareholder, and it's only natural to enter the board. As for whether Musk wants to further hold more than 10% of the shares, and whether he wants to "transform" Twitter, it all depends on his intentions.

All along, Musk has declared that he "regards money as dung", rejects physical assets and only holds equity, but this does not prevent his money-making machine Tesla from running wildly, and the latter's rising stock price is musk's climb to the top of the rich list, and it is also the basis for him to become Twitter's largest shareholder without blinking: for him, $3.672 billion is just a small amount of money.

While delivering beautiful answers in sales, Tesla's stock price has also gone all the way up with the new energy market, and even rose to $1229 / share at one point in November last year. Even after suffering from year-end fluctuations with other companies, Tesla still returned to its highs in just a few months, and it was stronger than expected. As of the close of trading on April 5, Tesla's stock price has returned to the thousand-dollar mark.

Tesla's position in the electric car market is unquestionable, and as the company's electric vehicles are sold one after another around the world, its income from selling cars has also increased year after year.

According to Tesla's 2021 financial report released some time ago, it delivered a total of 936,000 electric vehicles last year, nearly double that of 2020; total revenue and net profit reached $17.719 billion and $2.321 billion, respectively, and the net profit margin was as high as 13.1%, each of which far exceeded Wall Street expectations; among them, vehicle sales contributed $15.34 billion to Tesla's revenue, while the sale of carbon credits fell to $314 million, which was a throwaway for Tesla." Selling charcoal" hats.

Considering a series of negative factors such as "lack of core" and rising raw material prices last year, it is surprising that Tesla was able to complete such results. After all, automakers such as Ford, General Motors and Stallantis (Fiat Chrysler, Citroën's parent company) all saw a general sales decline last year. In this case, how does Tesla achieve continuous sales growth?

The answer is simple: cultivate a "small vegetable garden" and grow your own vegetables to eat.

In order to focus on design and final assembly, established auto giants often build long supply chains, and rely heavily on external suppliers in areas of software and computing expertise that they are not good at, making them vulnerable to supply chain turmoil; tesla, Musk has always insisted on letting it grow its software business independently, never outsourcing it to third parties.

Morris Cohen, a professor emeritus of manufacturing at Wharton, said Tesla was able to use well-supplied chips as a substitute in the crisis because its technicians rewrote the software, which is difficult for traditional automakers to do. "In a sense, Tesla is in his own hands."

In the field of batteries, Tesla has also made a similar layout. As early as a few years ago, it and the battery giant Panasonic jointly established the Nevada Super Factory, where Musk's super car-making program continues to contribute batteries - of course, given that Panasonic has been inseparable from the battery industry and Tesla as a partner, Musk has an absolute advantage in cooperation for many years; on the other hand, Tesla has even directly involved in the upstream of the supply chain, before it invested in a number of industries such as Nevada lithium mines.

"Tesla pulled automobile manufacturing back to the budding days of the industry, when Ford also had its own steel mill and rubber plantation." Professor Cohen said this about Musk's "self-sufficiency" strategy.

The cost of building a "vegetable garden" is huge, which also explains why Tesla's profits over the years are far less than those of traditional car companies such as Volkswagen and Toyota; but on the other hand, this model allows it to maintain production capacity in the face of a shortage of upstream raw materials, plus Tesla's models are much less than traditional manufacturers, and naturally fewer components are required.

But traditional manufacturers are not willing to fall behind, and even when Musk is complacent, they have also begun to accelerate their catch-up.

Markus Sch fer, CTO of Mercedes-Benz, previously said in an interview with the media that the company plans to reduce the number of chips that cannot be used universally, write its own software and even design its own car hardware in future models. Recently, news from german media Automobilwoche also pointed out that Schever and his team are developing a separate operating system, which is scheduled to be available in 2024.

Volkswagen is also a member of the trend of "self-built vegetable gardens". At the end of March this year, it signed two strategic memorandums of cooperation with two Chinese cobalt and nickel companies, Huayou Cobalt and Tsingshan Group. Specifically, their cooperation will involve the development of resources such as nickel and cobalt in Indonesia, as well as integrated businesses such as sulfate refining, precursor processing and cathode material production. In addition, Volkswagen also plans to set up one or more joint ventures with Huayou Cobalt in Guangxi and other places for the construction of new energy lithium battery cathode material integration projects.

As traditional car companies gradually establish their own new energy industry chain, a major advantage that Tesla is proud of will no longer exist. For Tesla and the traditional giants, the next few years will be the era of "close combat" - who can launch more attractive new models, gain the favor of consumers, who can occupy a world in this new era. At present, Tesla is higher than the traditional car companies in all aspects, but if you wait a few more years, who can say the situation at that time?

*Image courtesy of Yandex