- Tesla will report second-quarter earnings next week, and they're expected to be as bad as first-quarter earnings.
- Tesla is also burning cash at a furious rate, leading short-sellers to intensify their pressure on the company.
- However, Tesla's stock has held up — dismal Q2 earnings probably won't cause it to crash.
Estimates vary, but when Tesla reports second-quarter earnings next week, the outcome should be ugly. The carnage could match or exceed the first quarter, when Tesla lost $3.35 per share, with revenue of $3.41 billion.
The second-quarter was when, after earnings were announced and the markets noted that they weren't as bad as expected — Wall Street figured on a loss of $3.42 per share — Musk flipped out on a couple of analysts and sent the stock spiraling downward.
But here's the thing: right after first-quarter earnings broke, Tesla's stock basically didn't do anything until the Elon show started. I felt sort of vindicated at the time because I thought the first-quarter would actually be kind of blah for the market: Yep, Tesla lost a ton of money, again, but we know why.
To overuse an already overused phrase, the negative news was priced in.
So here we are again, three months later, and Tesla is actually up about 4% — not solidly above $300, but not below it, either. True, we're miles from the run to nearly $400 that markets witnessed in 2017. But on balance, that was an irrational surge, particularly given that Tesla didn't crash into its problems with its Model 3 rollout until late in the year.
So the scenario is pretty much the same as far as the stock price goes. Earnings will be objectively terrifying, but with just a few days to go before Tesla reports, shares have hung in there and Tesla's market cap, at around $50 billion, remains higher than Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' and Ford's.
My bold prediction: If you're expected Tesla to nose-dive next week, you'll be disappointed. The company will absorb the bad news. Here's why:
Revenue, revenue, revenue.
At the same time that literally nobody invested in Tesla expects a profitable second-quarter — and many of those bullish investors might not expect a profit in 2018, despite Musk's promises — the simple fact that Tesla is building and selling thousands more cars since the end of last year means that topline revenue is staged for takeoff.
True, Tesla has lost staggering amounts of money and could easily spend itself to a zero cash balance this year.
But the company has also reliably grown its revenue by about $200 million per quarter for a while now.
That pace should accelerate in the second half of 2018 and into 2019, when the $200-million bumps will seem like a fading memory as quarterly revenue heads toward $5 billion.
So much money will soon be flowing into Tesla that the carmaker will have a fair shot at quickly flipping the equation on its results, posting modest profits.
The Model 3 is an exciting car.
The Great Tesla Paradox: How can a company that has inspired such love and admiration for its products be so bad at building them?
People in the auto industry bang their heads against this all the time. I've done more than my share of headbanging. And then I drive one of the cars and I get it: They're terrific.
I've checked out the Model 3 twice and thought it was great both times. So have others, including the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer-winning car critic, Dan Neil. I know Dan and can safely say that it the Model 3 was a bad car, he wouldn't hold back.
Tesla bears spend far too much time obsessing over the company's surreal financials (they've been surreal for a long time, by the way) and not enough time considering the allure of its products and its customers' loyalty.
Take this into account: one of the reasons that Tesla is under so much stress these days is that while it could be a small-volume manufacturer of all-electric luxury cars and probably turn a profit, the market has demanded that it become a higher-volume producer of less expensive vehicles.
400,000 pre-orders for the Model 3 is impossible to ignore.
The massive and unprecedented number of pre-orders for the Model 3 is something of an insurance policy for Tesla, a bulwark against bad news.
Sure, Musk might be acting weird and the company might be resorting to unusual measures, such as erecting an assembly line under a tent in its factory parking lot. But no other carmaker on the planet has anything close to 400,000 advance orders for a vehicle, not to mention customers who were willing to put down a $1,000 deposit for a car they wouldn't get for several years.
See the rest of the story at INSIDER
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