Tesla (TSLA) shares are trading lower Tuesday after the company missed analyst expectations for first-quarter deliveries. The electric vehicle maker reported delivering 386,810 vehicles during the quarter, falling short of around 449,000 units analysts had anticipated.
Entrepreneur, Investor, and VC Angel Larry Goldberg joins Yahoo Finance to break down Tesla's performance and how it could operate moving forward.
Goldberg outlines his hope for Tesla after the disappointing results: "For me the quarterly results are not as important as the trends and where they're going. We're seeing the introduction of a new model... just beginning to crank up, so we don't have production from there. We see the cyber truck beginning to get under way. That's been a very promising launch, by the way. I expect that we're going to see 100,000 cyber trucks delivered this year. I think that's going to have a huge impact on performance for the year."
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- Tesla shares plunging after first-quarter delivery numbers. They came in at 386,810, below estimates of just over 449,000. Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian joins us now with an update. So a disappointment, and some people saw this coming.
- Yeah, Jared. This is a-- I'm almost shocked here looking at this number because Bloomberg had estimates consensus around 454-ish or so thereabouts. The Street had been pulling these numbers. Deutsche Bank was at 414, and they missed that.
This is also a huge sequential miss compared to Q4 and also a miss compared to last year, which was around 422, I believe-- I'm just remembering these numbers from last year. So just really, I think, well, well, well, well, well below what people thought would be reported, and I think that's why you're seeing the reaction on the share price right now.
It might even it might even go lower when the market opens at 9:30.
- Versus consensus. It's a 15% draw down, the 386,000 number there. You've had a chance to peruse some of the other delivery reportings that have come in from other automakers. How does this fit into the puzzle? What is the puzzle looking at now?
- So we saw Rivian today, a slight beat there, obviously much lower in terms of volume. We're talking about less than 10% volume here of what they're doing, so it's a different market for them.
But we talk about problems in China. Is that what's going on here? Is that the issue here? Is it just that they're hitting-- the amount of people that have converted over to EVs has hit that critical point where we're not seeing much more growth?
We've seen demand wane a bit. We've seen the Tesla image attached to Elon Musk-- the caliber numbers that came out. Reuters reported on this. Musk has had a noticeable effect on the Tesla brand equity, right? So a lot happening here, I think, under the surface of these numbers, and it's not looking too good right now.
- Yeah. Just to put some context on this, as you were talking about the comparisons between Rivian and Tesla, well, Rivian even for their total production figure, 13,980 vehicles produced during Q1. Tesla, for their other models alone-- so we're talking about the S. We're talking about the X. That brought in 17,000 deliveries.
But again, here, year over year, that is a decline. We-- I went back and just took a look at those figures really quickly here. That was coming in at upwards of 440,000 vehicles produced last year. So that is a year over year--
- Q4, right?
- For-- Yes.
- And Q1 last year was 422 or thereabouts, right?
- Right.
- Yeah. Yeah. So that's-- I think that's a-- I don't think they've had a sequential decline in deliveries in, if not forever, I can't remember the last time they had that.
- I'm looking at a heat map here on the Wi-Fi interactive. This is our electrical vehicles and components intraday map. This shows premarket quotes in the little red boxes below, and it's sorted by performance.
So Li Auto is actually in the green in the upper left, but check out in the bottom right. We have Go EV down 30%. We have MVST, that's Microvast Holdings-- that's battery technology. So charging and charging technology, battery technology just getting whacked. MVST down 25%. And those compared to Tesla down 6%, 7%. Nikola down 6%, 7%
So there's-- I think there's a lot of forward looking in this. Just to underscore where you were coming from before that the industry overall may be in for a more serious slump.
- Well, EVs versus-- talking about the rest of the industry. We talked a lot of specifically CEOs at the Auto Show-- at New York Auto Show-- and they say US auto sales are actually climbing this year from-- compared to last year. So it's the EV drawdown that we're seeing here.
I want to note a couple of things in that Tesla report. Notice it said other vehicles. They usually just say this X and Model S. That's including the Cybertruck now. So the question is, why don't they give us those numbers yet? I know they say they haven't volume production, but I think there's some people would want to hear that.
- There's some politics to breaking out numbers and segments. There always is there.
- Yeah, and then producer extraordinaire and the EP of the show, Belle Cavallo, told me that this is the first annual Q1 decline since 2022- in deliveries so-- or 2020. I can't even read the thing right-- 2020.
- And that was the beginning of the pandemic? All right. Well, thank you for that report. Pras Subramanian will be all over that going into the close today.