"Outrageous" is the first reaction of many people to see Tesla's 2022 Q1 financial report.
2022Q1 Tesla revenue of $18.756 billion, up about 80% from $10.3 billion in the same period last year, exceeded analysts' forecast of $17.8 billion.
At the same time, Tesla Q1 achieved a net profit attributable to the mother of 3.3 billion US dollars, significantly exceeding the 2.1 billion US dollars expected by analysts.
Three of the core figures are ridiculously high:
High gross margin. Tesla's Q1 gross profit margin reached 32.5%, maintaining a gross profit margin of more than 30% for three consecutive quarters, creating a new record for the gross profit margin of global new energy vehicle companies.
High delivery volumes. Tesla's Q1 deliveries of 310,000 units have been steadily rising for four consecutive quarters, and deliveries are expected to grow by 50% by the end of this year.
High cash flow. Tesla's cash balance at the end of the period was 17.5 billion US dollars, and the cash reserves were abundant, equivalent to the market value of ten Dongfeng Motors.
Tesla 2022Q1 deliveries
In addition, Tesla also released several information points:
Cybertruck is expected to be mass-produced next year, while Tesla will embark on the Robotaxi business, competing with Cruise, Waymo, Baidu Robotaxi, Tesla expects to achieve mass production of Robotaxi in 2024, and there is no steering wheel and pedals.
An obvious trend is that Tesla is becoming more and more profitable, far away from other new energy vehicle companies.
In 2022, Tesla's best selling in The country is model Y, sales of more than 100,000 units in January-March, and a model 3 price of 300,000 rough calculations, Tesla can earn 100,000 yuan, but if Tesla is replaced by the German high-end brand Mercedes-Benz, Audi's gross profit margin, the profit of the car company will turn sharply, replaced by Mercedes-Benz can only earn 36,000, replaced by Audi can only earn 30,000. (Mercedes-Benz gross margin 12.7%, Audi gross margin 10.7% in FY2021)
Tesla's Q1 financial report data "comprehensively exceeded expectations", has it been enough to prove that new energy vehicles have ushered in the "best era"?
01
Auto business, strengthen tesla king position
Tesla's upward revenue structure is mainly due to the continuous growth of the "car sales business".
Pulling open Tesla's $18.7 billion revenue structure, it will be found that the current car sales business is still Tesla's top pillar, accounting for 86.5% of the company's business revenue, while car rental revenue, energy storage revenue, service and other revenue account for less than 15%.
Selling cars is still the core of Tesla.
Car owners familiar with Tesla know that Tesla often oscillates between price increases and price cuts, and it is common for the car bought on the front foot to reduce the price by 20% after two months, so Tesla has been jokingly called "financial products" by domestic car owners.
Even at the beginning of this year, Tesla experienced a "price increase storm", and even scalpers intervened in the "second-hand market" of Tesla's order trading.
Obviously, the "high-risk" attribute of Tesla vehicles has not affected Tesla sales, and since Q1 2021, Tesla's car sales have achieved 4 consecutive increases, and the prospects are very good.
The front-end order volume has surged, and the factory of tesla in the back-end is not idle, and it is all working hard to build a factory and improve production efficiency.
Tesla Q1 delivered a total of 310,000 vehicles, an increase of 68% year-on-year, continuing to refresh deliveries, and Musk himself told analysts at the Q1 call that it is expected to achieve a 50% growth rate at the end of this year, according to this growth trend, analysts expect Tesla to deliver more than 1.5 million vehicles in 2022.
What is the concept of 1.5 million vehicles? It is probably 5 times more than the annual delivery volume of the three new domestic car-making forces Wei Xiaoli in 2021 combined.
It can be seen that if the new car-making forces led by Wei Xiaoli do not seize the time to narrow the gap, the future consumers' cognition of electric vehicles is likely to be only Tesla and "others".
Tesla's deliveries are growing so fast thanks to "building walls and accumulating grain."
Putting this sentence in Tesla's action is to continuously innovate manufacturing technology to improve the efficiency of car manufacturing, and to become an "infrastructure demon" who is willing to build a factory, and complete the localization transformation of Tesla.
First of all, look at the first point, in order to increase production capacity, Tesla can be described as a lot of investment, Q1 financial report shows that the company's research and development expenses of 870 million US dollars, accounting for 4.6% of revenue, and has been maintained at the same level in the past two years, very stable.
Tesla's research and development of "banknote capabilities" has played a significant role in the integrated minting process. The so-called integrated casting process is to highly integrate the original complex, fragmented parts and components, and die-cast into large aluminum castings by large tonnage die casting machines.
In the case of Model Y, 70 parts were originally required to complete the casting of the baseplate position, but after the one-piece die casting process, 70 parts were die-cast into two large castings, saving 2 hours of assembly process.
At the Austin plant, the process was applied to both the front and rear ends of the Model Y, making it even more efficient.
After the Berlin plant started production this year, this integrated die-casting process was also applied to the entire body through technical improvements, saving secondary heat treatment and further improving the production efficiency of the body.
At the same time, Tesla's 4680 battery, which is expected to be mass-produced this year, has further enhanced product competitiveness and reduced production costs.
In addition, Tesla also has its own countermeasures for the production environment inside the factory.
At the end of February this year, Tesla conducted an environmental impact assessment of the public welfare improvement project of parts production in the Shanghai factory, and increased production capacity by increasing the equipment start-up rate and parts production capacity.
According to the EIA report, Tesla has added new production processes such as power batteries, electric drive assemblies, and integrated molding of vehicle bodies, and manufactured key components for new energy vehicles, which were originally scheduled to be completed in April.
Even from technology to factory links, Tesla has maintained a rhythm of refinement, but there are still many uncontrollable factors outside. For example, due to the impact of the epidemic, the Shanghai Super Factory stopped working and stopped production.
At this time, Tesla's 4 super factories that produce cars worldwide are reflected - if any factory has a production cut or stop production, other factories can still produce as usual, thus helping Tesla alleviate the capacity crisis and give the factories that have reduced production and stopped production a certain amount of time to recover.
At the beginning of this year, the Dezhou plant, which is 10 times larger than the Shanghai plant, was officially put into operation, providing the basic conditions for concentrating all automobile production links.
According to Musk's introduction at the opening ceremony of the Texas factory, this factory integrates all the links involved in production, the raw materials enter from the entrance, and after the circulation inside the factory is completed, it can be turned from another door into a new car.
For example, Tesla's Berlin factory produces a Model Y in just 10 hours, which is equivalent to the amount of sleep you have for one night, and a car is right in front of your eyes.
02
Selling fuel vehicles does not make money, selling new energy vehicles to make money?
Does it make money selling new energy vehicles?
For this question, the answers of different types of car companies at different stages of development are not the same.
In the camp of traditional fuel vehicles, Honda CEO Mibu Toshihiro's view is "not making money", he believes that electric vehicles are more like household appliances, honda's electrification process is more to comply with electrification policies around the world.
But Tesla's Q1 gross margin of 32.5% completely broke the saying that "new energy vehicles do not make money".
In contrast, the BBA that consumers are familiar with, its business gross margin is also willing to bow to the wind, the financial report shows that in 2021 BMW gross margin of 17.6%, Mercedes-Benz 12.7%, Audi 10.7%, Tesla average BBA gross margin of 2.5 times higher.
The reasons why Tesla's gross profit margin can climb rapidly are more complex, in addition to expanding production, improving efficiency to amortize costs, and using scale effects to make profits, the reason is also the change brought about by the "new energy vehicle track".
Change is the first to happen in business models.
Traditional fuel vehicles are front-end sales cars, consumers see is what they get, in the 4S shop after looking at a model, there is almost no room for selection, can only choose the appearance and interior of the car, car companies sell car flexible space is insufficient.
At the same time, the back-end after-sales service of traditional fuel vehicles only includes repair and maintenance. However, the new energy vehicle business is obviously not so simple, almost all new energy vehicle companies, in addition to the appearance of the interior for consumers to choose, but also provide different functions of the intelligent cockpit and different levels of automatic driving assistance function.
Taking Tesla Model Y as an example, it provides consumers with two power solutions of rear-wheel drive and dual-motor all-wheel drive, and also provides an enhanced version of automatic assisted driving and fully automatic driving capabilities on automatic driving, and these two functions require additional costs for users, the former price is 32,000 yuan, and the latter is 64,000 yuan.
Similarly, the Polar Fox Alpha is also this operation, such as the Alpha S Huawei HI Advanced Version equipped with high-level automatic driving capabilities, which is 178,000 more expensive than the Alpha 525S.
The option of providing consumers with diversified configurations is the reason why new energy vehicles have more profit space than fuel vehicles, and in the future, new energy vehicle companies represented by Tesla are likely to further improve profitability through "software and hardware" in parallel.
Among them, OTA may become one of the majority of the future revenue of car companies, in simple terms, OTA is to upgrade the in-car software, automatic driving level to improve the tram experience, intelligent level, and open to users to charge.
In last year's Q4 conference call, Tesla regarded the software business with FSD as the core source of profit for Tesla, and thought that the software business would have considerable imagination.
This year's Q1 Musk also mentioned FSD again, and determined that FSD will bring technical advantages to the new business of Robotaxi in the future.
Therefore, car companies are not selling the car itself, but the owner's right to choose and the ability to connect everything, which also promotes the business scope of new energy vehicles to be more imaginative than traditional fuel vehicles.
While expanding their profit range, new energy vehicles are also innovating the model of automobile sales and becoming more "economical".
Combing through the sales methods of traditional fuel vehicles, basically dealers earn the difference, the marketing method of organizing offline activities, the profits taken by dealers and the costs brought by offline activities, all of which make the profits of traditional fuel vehicle companies further compressed.
And Tesla? After the release of Tesla's financial report Q1, Musk proudly replied on Twitter: "Tesla's market value of $1 trillion, $0 advertising spend."
Most people may find it impossible, but if you think about it, you've never seen Tesla on airport billboards or social media opening pages.
Although domestic new energy vehicle companies still have a lot of investment in marketing, they need to move 4S stores into the core area of the mall, put advertisements, and further enhance brand recognition rates, but the "direct operation" model commonly used by new energy vehicle companies can obviously pocket most of the profits, making the gross profit margin more competitive.
In addition, Tesla, as a mature brand, has provided a reference route for electric vehicles to "reduce marketing expenses". It can be expected that with the improvement of brand recognition of domestic car companies, car companies will also choose this method to throttle in the future to further improve profit margins.
Some people may ask, tesla is the only one in the new energy vehicle company to maintain a high profit margin, and the individual cases cannot explain the industry situation.
However, if you pay attention to the situation of the new domestic car-making forces, you will find that the current average interest rate of Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng is 10%, and the ideal is 21.1%. Taking Ideal as an example, Ideal sold 90,491 units for the full year of 2021, up 177.4% from 32,624 units in 2020 and gross margin of 21.3% in 2021, an increase of 4.9% over the same period. The ideal situation is similar.
In summary, the sales volume of new energy vehicles and the gross profit margin of car companies are always positively correlated, which also confirms that the gross profit margin of domestic new energy vehicle companies is only a matter of time and scale, and the new energy automobile industry is still worth looking forward to.
However, new energy vehicle companies will not always have a smooth future, and the problems faced by Tesla and all new energy vehicle companies are the same. That's the problem of raw materials and supply chains.
On the Q1 earnings call, many analysts also continued to ask Musk about the current nickel, lithium price increases and supply chain issues required for batteries, Musk admitted that this is a major challenge for Tesla, but at the same time he also released three ways to deal with the challenge:
(1) Opened a factory to collect lithium. When everything is in place, Musk believes that Tesla's lithium supply for the next 1-2 years will not be a problem;
(2) Recycling. Tesla will collect the remaining waste from the gigafactory, each factory can collect about 50 tons a week, and Musk also revealed that it will recycle fuel vehicles and make targeted supplements to Tesla's car-making materials;
(3) Establish long-term cooperative relations with suppliers.
These methods may provide a certain reference for domestic new energy vehicle companies.
Heart of the Car · The connoisseur said" trailer
On Tuesday, April 26, 20:00-21:00, Yang Tengfei, Vice President & Operation Director of MAXIEYE, Intelligent Driving Technology, will be a guest car heart · Experts said, talk about "how intelligent driving has become a new kinetic energy for heavy trucks to reduce costs and increase efficiency".