I didn't mean "easy" to spot, I meant "easy money" as momentum drove TSLA from about $20-35 in 2012/early 2013 to $250 by the end of February 2014. I simply pointed out that the stock is still slightly down compared to that date (Feb 2014) - all the talk about retail trading "Teslanaires" buying their car with TSLA stock profits is gone. TSLA has been flat till today, with a few spikes to $180 and $280 in between.
Unfortunately, only a few of the past replies have been about the content/arguments I presented, such as various links (Bloomberg FCF chart etc.), internal battery competition with supplier Panasonic or the fact that
only 14% of the "full GF" is currently being built and ready by 2017 for EV cell production - with all of the $2bn "GF money" raised in early 2014 already gone and mostly used for other business purposes.
So I'm going to retire from this thread and the forum for a while since this discussion isn't on-topic (GF investor thread) and therefore not very productive imho.
Everybody can return safely to the bull echo chamber
I think the reason you don't get responses on the actual subject is because people are tired of repeating the same things over and over again as this line of commenting hasn't changed nor has the responses... But you know what... I'm bored, so why not?
Huge negative cash burn -> Well, they did raise a heck of a lot of money, right? Shouldn't they be spending it? I would be more worried if they were hoarding it up until a rainy day. It has been pulled up before but what they claimed they would spend the 2B$ on was cleverly worded such as to allow them to basically spend it on whatever they wanted to. Thus far the comments about needing additional funding beyond that have been to support *other* growth, not directly related to the gigafactory (granted I don't think anything is restricting them from using the 750M$ on the gigafactory... but that wasn't the focus of the claim.)
That being said it has also been stated that the numbers on Construction don't tell the full story on the cost of the gigafactory. Someone has already recently pointed out that R&D so that the cells are fit to be used in that factory is a part of the cost of building that factory. Tesla doesn't (and shouldn't) itemize every little thing they spend their R&D/CapEx/OpEx on. Now that they have moved into the factory (at least on some level) there is likely to be costs associated with the bringing this factory online that fall under OpEx finance lines.
And why do you say it is "already gone" Last I saw they had 1.4BN in cash, if you add in 750M$ raised for "other purposes" that puts them back over 2BN$ of funding they had to allocate toward the factory. Because really, you can say that they got ambitious with the X, and had to lay the groundwork for it, plus the Model 3 growth, and the 750M$ raised was basically paying back on that cash burn they already spent. So now they are back to a healthy cash pool that can be funded toward the Factory.
To put it another way, total cash raised was roughly 3BN, they "spent" at least 750M$ of that toward expansions at Fremont, and I would argue they have probably dumped a decent amount toward the gigafactory.
They have spent (as of June 30) a little more than 200M$ on stated construction of the factory. If as you say that is "all they have spent" and we know they have already moved in some services into the building (meaning that it would have to be at least mostly finished being built for that section, in order to stick people and machinery in there...) then one could start to estimate that all 7 sections being completed should cost them around... what? 1.4BN... Let's throw an extra 100M$ on top of that for "other expenses" so it is 1.5, subtract off the 200M already spent, leaving about 1.3BN left to go. Huh, how much cash do they have left? Oh, right! 1.4BN...
So where is this cash problem of which you speak? They back funded the 750M$ from the spending they already did to grow the business in a way that if things go like they are looking will be returning dividends to the company (for future growth and investments) starting Q1 of next year. So if you had the choice, slowly invest 750M$ in cash over the next few years to have it paying back by 2020, or invest it all this year and have it paying back by Q1 of 2016? I would have to say you would be stupid to go with the slow route.
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Oh and one more note, it had been pointed out that if you take off the CapEx and the R&D they would be easily in the green. If they wanted to sit back now and stop growth (maybe even tailor back on some of the OpEx since you are going to stop growing there is a lot of pointless OpEx if that was your goal... Fire like 2,000 some odd employees at least) such that you could keep a reasonable R&D budget going and be in the green. But noone wants that... That is why investors in general are not panicing over the numbers on your bloomberg chart. That is a good thing since that spending is contributed to 3 major things:
Growing your market footprint so you can service a global market (They are just trying to get to the level of where MB and BMW is at, nevermind trying to go any further in global coverage, we aren't even to BMW numbers yet as far as footprint goes)
R&D spending to continue to keep yourself ~10 years ahead of the competition (maybe further... don't know... noone has made a real Model S killer yet... which was released in 2012 and shown to the public in 2010... I think someone might have one to market by what? 2017 is the current timeframe... who knows? they keep saying "in three years" for the past 3 years...)
CapEx to grow the business to make not just 100k cars, not just 500k cars, but eventually millions of cars by 2025 (If they keep making products as they already have with the Roadster, the S, the X, and Stationary storage, then they will have no issue selling everything they can make so I fine with growing to millions of cars, because they have never yet made even remotely a crappy product or concept a crappy thing.
So spend the money. Spend it as fast as you can, but as smart as you can.