So you two are really going with the argument that Tesla for some odd reason chooses to wait much longer before letting overseas orders go into production. Literally how does this make any sense? You guys are grasping at straws.
As you might know I am the one who updates the Wait Time tables for more than a year. Based on my close observation of the delivery times and a host of other contemporaneous information, gleaned from various sources, including EM interviews, ERs, shareholders meetings, etc, I've pieced together the process of how Tesla manages reservations.
Here is my understanding of how it works.
Allocation of the production to a particular country by Tesla is the first step in the process of assigning the estimated delivery time to a particular region of the world. It is done based on Tesla projection of the relative share of the incoming orders from a particular geographic area of the market, so that in steady state the delivery time estimates are more or less uniform across the geographic markets. As part of the allocation of production, ordering of parts is based on the above projections as well.
If the delivery time estimate for a particular geographic area is ahead (sooner) of other areas, it means that incoming orders from this area are lower than expected by Tesla. The opposite, i.e. if estimated delivery time for an area is behind (later) the other areas, means that incoming orders from this area are stronger than anticipated by Tesla.
For example wait time for Europe and Asia currently is much longer than for US, which is consistent with the healthy increase of incoming order from overseas, especially Asia. As mentioned in the latest shareholders letter, the growth of orders from Asia in Q1 was more than 160%
So once again, gauging backlog by just considering wait time in US is wrong, and you should stop doing it.
It doesn't matter if the cars on the boat to China hasn't been counted as revenue yet, it still isn't part of the backlog. The backlog is cars in queue waiting to go into production. That is the relevant number when discussing how much leeway they have to fill the upcoming increase in capacity. But it isn't even relevant to the demand discussion as it has no influence in the fluctuations of the wait, which has been steady.
Once again, the cargo ship time to China is 4 weeks, while delivery in US is about two. The difference is only two weeks. The difference in wait time dwarfs this as it is, as I mentioned before, 11 weeks.
I suggest acknowledging the obvious, accepting that you've been wrong on this, and stop perpetuating inaccurate information on this Forum.