Tesla vehicles will be on display June 3, 2022 at a sales and service center in Vista, California.
Mike Blake | Portal
Tesla’s shares fell 10% Tuesday morning, a day after the electric carmaker reported vehicle production and deliveries numbers for the fourth quarter of 2022.
Deliveries are the closest approximation to Tesla’s published sales. The company reported 405,278 total shipments for the quarter and 1.31 million total shipments for the year. Those numbers represented a record for the Elon Musk-led automaker and 40% growth. in deliveries year over year, but they fell short of analysts’ expectations.
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As of December 31, 2022, Wall Street expected Tesla to report around 427,000 deliveries for the final quarter of the year, according to a consensus of analyst estimates compiled by FactSet. Estimates updated in December and included in the FactSet consensus ranged from 409,000 to 433,000.
These more recent estimates were in line with a company-compiled consensus shared by Martin Viecha, Tesla’s vice president of investor relations.
Some Wall Street analysts believe Tesla’s missing shipments are causing problems for the electric vehicle maker, but others see a buying opportunity for the company in 2023.
Baird analyst Ben Kallo, who recently named Tesla a top pick for 2023, maintained an outperform rating and said he will remain a buyer of the stock ahead of the company’s earnings report, which is scheduled for Jan. 25 is.
“Fourth-quarter deliveries missed consensus but beat our estimates,” he said in a note Tuesday. “Importantly, production increased ~20% quarter-on-quarter, which we expect to continue into 2023 as gigafactories in Berlin and Austin continue to ramp up.”
Analysts at Goldman Sachs said they view the delivery report as “incrementally negative” and view Tesla as a company “well positioned for long-term growth.” Goldman reiterated its buy rating on the stock in a note Monday, saying vehicle affordability will be a “key driver of growth” in a challenging macroeconomic environment.
“We believe the key debates from here will be whether vehicle deliveries can be accelerated again, margins and the Tesla brand,” the analysts said.
Tesla stock suffered an extreme year-long sell-off in 2022, prompting CEO Musk to tell employees in late December not to “worry too much about the stock market frenzy.”
Musk has partially attributed Tesla’s falling share price to rising interest rates. However, critics point to his rocky $44 billion Twitter acquisition as a bigger culprit for the slide.
Morgan Stanley analysts said they think the company’s share price weakness is a “window to buy.”
“Between a deteriorating macroeconomic backdrop, record high unaffordability and increasing competition, there are hurdles all auto companies will have to overcome in the coming year,” they said in a statement Tuesday. “However, with this in mind, we believe TSLA has the potential to extend its lead in the EV race as it leverages its cost and scale advantages to differentiate itself from the competition.”
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Michael Bloom contributed to this report.