I'm a little surprised at wall street's unsubdued reaction to the earnings call. Personally i heard as many questions as answers. I thought it was a decidedly mixed bag. I'm an optimist so i'll start with the cons, and end on a positive note with the pros:
Cons:
- Cybertruck volume production in 2024 at the earliest (and I think that's optimistic based on its radical design and where they are in the process).
- 4680 volume production is still not close.
- Margins will probably tighten further.
- Sales in China do not appear to be growing quarter over quarter.
- Next-gen FSD will not be retrofittable to existing cars (so much for the whole "Teslas will become appreciating assets" line)
- Primary focus seems to be on maintaining the short-term margin and cash numbers rather than R&D (and to a lesser extent, service). I would prefer Tesla were less worried about Wall Street's reactions quarter to quarter, and made fewer choices based on ruthless cost cutting and more choices based on providing a superior product to the market.
- Solar? Do we still do that? Looking at P&L it looks like Solar makes up less than 1% of profit and is low margin at best, and its growth is anemic. Hard to glean specifics since it's lumped in with Energy Storage on several charts, which is doing much better.
Pros:
- Immediate bottom line still extraordinarily healthy in terms of free cash flow, cash on hand, and margins relative to the industry.
- Model 3 and Model Y are crushing it everywhere around the world.
- Solid if conservative guidance of 1.8 million units (which Elon immediately and stupidly torpedoed by resetting expectations to 2 million -- there was no benefit in doing so ... sorry i know this is supposed to be the positive portion of the post)
- Energy storage revenue is growing at a very healthy rate, even faster than Auto, and looks like it will continue to do so.
So like I said, kind of a mixed bag. Obviously I'm happy that Wall Street is happy, but I definitely have my own set of serious risks and questions in my personal valuation of the company that I would love to see addressed somehow. I know we're all banking on future product reveal events to clear some of these up. We shall see.