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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Tesla Posts Its First Annual Profit (electrek.co) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the positive-results dept.
140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Tesla announced its 2019 Fourth Quarter results. "Expectations were high this quarter after Tesla destroyed earnings expectations with surprisingly high profits last quarter. Today, Tesla announced that it made $7.384 billion in revenue and it reported surprising profits of $2.14 per share (Non-GAAP) in Q4 2019 -- over expectations for both revenue and earnings. The automaker continues to improve its financial position with strong results and increased its cash position by almost $1 billion to now $6.3 billion." Stock zoomed in after hours trading and continued to rally today. The short interest tracker S3 Partners reported that shorts lost another $1.5 billion today, as the stock zoomed very quickly on open giving them very little time to cover at anything close to yesterday's prices. According to this report they had $5.6 billion YTD profit last June. They have raked up losses of almost $13 billion dollars since.

The investor conference call revealed nuggets like improved range for dual motor cars, Model Y production starting sooner than expected, the solar side has started growing again, etc. Despite all the headlines about first "profitable" year, technically the company lost money on GAAP basis.
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Tesla Posts Its First Annual Profit More

Tesla Posts Its First Annual Profit

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  • Can’t wait (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:29PM (#59672900)

    For the oddly large Tesla hater crowd here to spin this.

    • non-GAAP (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mschaffer ( 97223 )

      Ok, then. How about the GAAP earnings? Not quite as rosy. Non-GAAP is just carbon emissions from Elon's mouth.

      It's not spin, it's a fact.

      • Re:non-GAAP (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:39PM (#59672934)

        Lol like flies on shit the haters show up.

      • Re: non-GAAP (Score:5, Informative)

        by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:42PM (#59672948)
        No. Non GAAP is cash basis. They add cash but not COGS when they sell things they haven't delivered yet. $7000 FSD software comes to mind. They charge you, and that cash adds to their profits but not in GAAP basis because they haven't delivered it yet so it sits on their books as a liability until they fulfill it. But, their cash position moved forward nicely ($1B) suggests they are over the cash flow hurdles and will continue to be profitable. Plus, once they deliver FSD this year (they will), all those sales will book, and accounting-wise they will have a fantastic quarter.
        • FSD was due years ago. What makes you think this is now the magic year for "some definition" of FSD? Anything less than the promised level 5 autonomy is bullshit. Rei told us a year ago we'd have it before the end of 2019. (Checks calendar....)

          • Re: non-GAAP (Score:5, Insightful)

            by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @10:02PM (#59673356)
            The progress in the year that I have owned mine. I went from no lane changes to having the car go 100 miles by itself from on-ramp to off ramp weaving around traffic and managing freeway interchanges and exists all on its own. When you extend that to city streets and see the new visuals; it gives you a sense of what they are capable of, given the progression.

            The delays suck, but they are clearly learning how to get there. I don't think they realizes they needed their own chips. They made them now, and were recently installed in my car. The autopilot became much smoother. There's an interesting webcast they made called "Autonomous day" which goes into deep detail. I suggest you watch it to get a sense of reality for yourself. Thinking they haven't made any strides and that there's a button that will appear one update in the UI that just turns on level 5 driving is just ignorant.

          • God forbid they wait to release something until it actually works.

            Releasing something like this due to some arbitrary circle on a calendar is how people die. Which, by the way, would have people like you lining up to hit the submit button on some shitpost saying that it wasn't ready and they should have never released it.

            And really, you're holding up Rei as some insider that knows fuck-all about when something will ship from a company that is almost as secretive about their feature launches as it gets?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by olddoc ( 152678 )
          I'm not positive, but GAAP is defined. Non-GAAP is not necessarily an exact term as quoted by different companies. I think one would need to look at the legally reported GAAP financial statements and then see what financial engineering was done to report the numbers not using generally accepted accounting practices. There are sometimes reasons why an investor might disagree with generally accepted accounting practices but I think the company is obligated to explain their reasoning why you should be looking
      • Tesla turned a profit? Better get my rifle out to get me some of the pigs that'll shortly be flying past. I can store the carcases until I'm ready to eat them in hell, which I hear has just frozen over.

      • Be that as it may, the short interest is still being squeezed, meaning that shorts who want to unwind their positions by buying shares have to pay a large premium to do so. It’s a “panic meltup” for the shorts.

    • Re: Can’t wait (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:37PM (#59672930)
      There are so many people I know who want a model 3 as their next car it's not even funny. I have an X and it's truly a revolutionary car. Former Mercedes owner
      • I have a model 3. It's a decent car. It is not in anyway revolutionary. They moved the dashboard to a center mount lcd. Everything else is pretty normal.

        • Re: Can’t wait (Score:5, Interesting)

          by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @08:29PM (#59673128)

          I too got a model 3.
          The acceleration is fine, the interior is roomy, and comfortable - it's a nice car.
          But watching on the screen the jittery images of the other nearby cars as they're seen by the FSD computer gives me no hope that the Full Self Driving will ever reliably work on the current models.

      • Re: Can’t wait (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Tom ( 822 ) on Friday January 31, 2020 @01:19AM (#59673680) Homepage Journal

        Yes and no.

        There's something amazing in the Teslas (and, disclaimer: I own Tesla stocks) - but there is also much missing. I test-drove a Model S about two years ago, along with a bunch of other cars, and then went back and bought another BMW.

        The Model S has amazing technology and the acceleration is mindblowing. But the comfort isn't there. I regularily drive 500+ km in my BMW 5 and it's a fantastic long-distance travel car. None of the many other cars I've driven comes even close, and I've experienced at least 30 different cars first-hand as I often fly to a location on busines and then take a rental car.

        Elon, if you're listening - hire some interior designers away from BMW and let them work their magic on the next Tesla. If I could buy a BMW with Tesla technology, I'd empty my bank account right away.

        • You are a very small market segment for Tesla to bother at this moment. Eventually when, or if, Tesla makes several million cars/trucks/SUVs a year it might have the capacity to serve people who routinely drive 300 miles.

          Looks like Tesla's idea of comfort for 300 mile drives are to improve self driving capability. It is not like to give you ventilated and cooled plush leather seats for a while.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tom ( 822 )

            I'm not talking about the seats.

            Driver comfort is not just sitting, but also how to handle things. Haptics is crazy important when you want to keep your eyes on the road, and having everything on a touchscreen is a ridiculous design decision for a lump of metal moving at considerable speeds, for example.

        • I agree with everything you said, but disagree on the prioritization.

          I have a BMW 435xi in my garage that doesn't get driven any more despite having a higher quality interior, because it feels like I have to file paperwork to get all that horsepower out of the engine in comparison to my wife's Model 3 dual-drive.

          The BMW's interior is definitely nicer, but the Model 3 is more of a driver's car - it handles better, it has instant acceleration and just as good braking, and the center of gravity of the whole ca

      • I don't know if you've seen the news but the Model 3 was the third best sold car in Europe in december. I don't know if it's a glitch due to a massive delivery of backlogged cars or some kind of sales trick but it's amazing anyway.

    • Despite all the headlines about first "profitable" year, technically the company lost money on GAAP basis.

      Made up numbers are made up. Make the numbers how you want, and you can make Uber and WeWork highly profitable, too!

    • No doubt something Elon said will prove that this is all fake and how they are really running out of cash and lose money with every Model 3 sold and VW is going to eat lunch because they do 10 MILLION cars a year and Tesla fires and what a huckster the SEC will arrest him any minute now I know this guy who got his delivered and there was a paint bubble and who is going to turn their head 15 degrees right to read a speedometer and ha ha ha the GLASS WINDOW broke and everybody is sick of waiting for charger s

      • Did I miss anything?

        Panel gaps.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The state of autopilot is a bigger issue than build quality, which has somewhat improved over the past year.

          There are two main issues. The current autopilot is dangerous because it doesn't monitor driver attention properly and is easily fooled. The fact that you can take a nap and it won't notice suggests that it needs to be greatly improved.

          It's safety record is questionable. Tesla refuses to release a proper data set for autopilot so at the moment we can't say if it's better or worse than a human driver.

      • Repair delays. 3 weeks wait to get in to have window fixed which can only be done by a Tesla tech.

    • Do you hear the sound of a goal post moving?
      - Electric cars will never work
      - Electric cars is a niche market. Only rich can buy these cars
      - Tesla cannot build a middle class car and generate profit
      - See they have troubles, therefore, it is never to work
      - One 1/4 could be a temporary effect in the long run they are not profitable.
      - They cannot build a factory in a year in China

      However, now they facing their the ultimate final enemy East-German NIMBYs protecting a tree plantation (which they call a forest) to

    • I've already seen several people try to push stories about how Tesla stock is going to destroy the stock market and all of America's economy. So I'm sure they're quite ready!

  • This is like how Amazon did it. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:30PM (#59672902)

    After Amazon ditched the books only business model, it was so heavily invested in becoming larger that they didn't post profits for years. Seems like this is what Tesla has been doing in regards to making more cars and batteries. I'm looking forward to lithium batteries being cheaper in the future when they are churning out an absurd number of them.

    Cue the haters and the short sellers.

    • They laughed at Amazon back then, too. Hell, I even laughed at Amazon back then. Apparently the difference between us and the rest of them is that we learn from our mistakes.

    • Re:This is like how Amazon did it. (Score:4, Informative)

      by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @08:13PM (#59673070) Journal
      Seriously, educate yourself [vox.com]. Amazon has consistently turned a profit (GAAP - not made-up numbers) since 2003. Why you keep insisting on a fallacy about "no profit" I don't know, other than you like to be consistently proven wrong?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Compuser ( 14899 )

        You link shows they had negligible net income compared to net revenue. Few people remember if these negligible numbers were positive or negative, most remember they were non-existent which is roughly what the original post said and your article demonstrated.

        • NET income. They actually had net income! Contrary to the claim, that means they made a profit. The original post said they didn't make a profit for years - but that is provably not true.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Amazon was founded in 1994. 2003-1994 = 9 years. Yes, they didn't make a profit for years, and then for several years more their profit was minimal since Bezos preferred to dump the money back into the company. It wasn't until AWS really got going that they started making more money than they could spend.

            • For 17 years, they made profit. Tesla is already 17 years old, and still doesn't make a profit. So they're twice as bad as Amazon at this point - and falling even further behind (Tesla was founded in 2003).

      • Amazon has consistently turned a profit (GAAP - not made-up numbers) since 2003. Why you keep insisting on a fallacy about "no profit" I don't know, other than you like to be consistently proven wrong?

        Perhaps they're thinking of the nine years between 1994 and 2003 when they didn't?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 )
          Amazon went public in 1997. Just 6 years later, they were consistently turning a profit. Tesla went IPO 10 years ago, and still does not turn a profit.

  • Flamebait story ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @07:30PM (#59672904)

    Mr. BeauHD - most of the readers in here are not interested in the Tesla stocks and market valuations.
    While a story on a new technical development by Tesla would be interesting, this one is not.
    You could at least put more in the summary about the improved ranges, model Y and solar than the financial info.
    Thank you.

    • I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bug_hunter ( 32923 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @08:02PM (#59673022)

      This shows that Tesla wont just declare bankrupcy and be sold off for parts anytime soon - which many people will find important information.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        They could have turned a profit earlier but kept re-investing the money in new production lines and new factories. The decision to make a modest profit in one year doesn't really tell you much.

    • Model Y was originally rated to have 280 miles, thats what the order page showed till yesterday. Field testing helped them fine tune the settings and they got it up to 315 miles. https://ww.electrek.co/2020/01... [electrek.co] Elon also said in the conference call Model S range will go up from 373 miles to over 400. They are preparing to apply for EPA certification for it. That would make Tesla the first car to break the 400 mile range milestone.

      From the letter to the shareholders:

      In Q4, we deployed 54MW of solar, 26% more than in the prior quarter. Where offered, subscription solar has grown significantly in Q4. With a monthly subscription that can generate income from the first month of usage, there is no reason not to have solar panels installed.

      • With a monthly subscription that can generate income from the first month of usage, there is no reason not to have solar panels installed.

        Well, I need a new roof, which is an excellent reason not to have solar panels installed. There are an infinite number of reasons to not have solar panels installed. There are even a fair number of good reasons.

        Talking in absolutes is never a good idea.

    • You were interested enough to comment, which increases the amount of content on slashdot, in turn increasing search engine hits, and thus ad impressions. Mission accomplished. If you want to see less stories like this on slashdot, you just fucked up.

  • Bezos: "What? Profits!? Clearly we've done something egregious".

  • Despite all the headlines about first "profitable" year, technically the company lost money on GAAP basis.

    So, if you cook the books, and use your own standards for what is an expense or revenue, you can make a profit! But when you actually have to do what is legal and normal - you still lose... I mean, if you look at the books the right way, Uber and WeWork make HUGE profits, too!

    • Yet they show no signs up folding up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        Because, like a few other related companies, they have a shareholder winning to pump in billions upon billions without any hope of recovery, to try to prove his point or be his own personal entertainment until he retires.

        So much of this is just Musk playing with expensive toys, rather than building a sustainable business. They are just his toy cars, trains and rockets.

        If/when he walks away, is forced out, or dies... the hope is that they'll be profitable by then, but really... it's just a throwaway-money k

    • And yet they also said that their cash position strengthened by over $1B and they won't be doing a capital raise.

      Yeah, sounds like a super unhealthy company. In no way could the GAAP number be different due to having to log liabilities for pre-sold features that they already have the cash for selling (full self driving)...

      When they ship FSD, the GAAP number for that quarter is going to be way over what the non-GAAP numbers will be, and then you'll bleat on about "cooking the books" for that too, right?

      Ther

  • is the $1.5 Billion people who were shorting Tesla stock are going to have to eat now.

  • You can laugh now, but 3 months ago when Tesla's stock was at $250 I posted that their revenue was down and EV sales were declining. Of course, now their stock is up at $640 I look like an idiot :( https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] I hope nobody listened to my advice - I gambled away a lot of my pension fund shorting Tesla, and I'm probably going to be looking for work again at the age of 70. I know I come across as a smartass at times, but most of my "knowledge" comes from a bit of Googling and the sad h

    • What an idiot you were, you should have listened to me instead: their revenue WAS down that quarter 10% year-over-year like you said, but their revenue is UP year over year about 2% for this quarter! That's pretty good! 2% growth! By the way: you shouldn't short Tesla. It is a cult stock.

      • Cult stock: this will be a case study years from now in business schools around the world. The lessons being 1) We have a word for people who try to time the market: "poor", and 2) people will gamble enormous amounts of money irrationally; people can't do math.

        I believe Tesla will eventually run out of fanboy and momentum player money the stock price will come crashing down hard. The problem is timing that event. See rule #1, above.
        I see popcorn. Huge buckets of popcorn.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fred911 ( 83970 )

          'Tesla will eventually run out of fanboy and momentum player money'

          May or may not. But, do you want to bet against 'that guy' with your hard earned cash? I think that would be a bad bet, all things considered.

          remember x.com?

          • Oh no, absolutely not. I have never for a moment considered buying and I never short anything. Shorting has theoretical infinite loss potential whereas buying your max loss is your initial investment. Infinite loss is too rich for my blood! I'm on the sidelines with my extra large popcorn (with butter, please) cheering on both teams for fun.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by olddoc ( 152678 )
      What fiduciary let you do an uncovered short sale in a pension fund? At worst you should have been dealing in options with set limited loss possible.

      • Re:I hold up my hands - what a dumbass I am :( (Score:5, Informative)

        by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday January 31, 2020 @01:51AM (#59673744) Homepage

        What fiduciary let you do an uncovered short sale in a pension fund?

        Don't worry, it's a made-up story by a troll. Compare these account names and IDs:

        l10010001000 ( 6569066 )
        110010001000 ( 697113 )

        The first one posted this sad tale of woe, but the link goes to a comment posted by the second one.

        So this is trolling by impersonation. The account name was clearly chosen to impersonate user name 110010001000.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I don't know why they bothered, the comment by the real 110010001000 is funny enough on its own.

          Thinking back I think 110010001000 was the one who posted the infamous "electricity will become a part time thing, only available when the wind blows" comment about renewables too. I wish I could find that one now.

        • Or you could just read the comment and get that it's trolling someone with a similar user name from the extremely obvious tone?
    • This has to be a troll, but for everyone else's benefit I'll point out why: anyone who would risk a significant portion of their investing capital on shorting a high volatility stock is what we would call a "pig", and deserves to be slaughtered. Of course you hear of some big short bets that either went great or poor, but those are usually "rock star" hedge funds trying to hit a home run to make a big name for themselves. Literally no one is stupid enough to do what you say, and if you are, I highly doubt
      • Actually, my last statement isn't totally correct - it should be avoided like the plague for anything except going long (buying and holding the stock). If you are truly convinced they are a long-term miracle, then you can safely ignore this kind of volatility. With the exception of a couple things, like it being very hard to know a good entry point (DCA helps), and being very tempting to sell if your investment triples in value in 3 months..

    • You know what? I at least respect that you are willing to say that you were wrong. Unlike some other trolls that post the same tired and debunked horseshit over and over in any Tesla-related article.

  • Profits eh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Thursday January 30, 2020 @09:19PM (#59673242) Homepage
    From the Tesla investor website FAQ [tesla.com]

    Does Tesla pay a dividend? Does it plan to?
    Tesla has never declared dividends on our common stock. We intend on retaining all future earnings to finance future growth and therefore, do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

    So I guess there really is no 'surprising profits of $2.14 per share' for shareholders, just some inflated gambling stock price jump.

    • From the Tesla investor website FAQ [tesla.com]

      Does Tesla pay a dividend? Does it plan to? Tesla has never declared dividends on our common stock. We intend on retaining all future earnings to finance future growth and therefore, do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

      So I guess there really is no 'surprising profits of $2.14 per share' for shareholders, just some inflated gambling stock price jump.

      Meh. Publicly-traded companies routinely reinvest all profits while growing and often for a long time afterwards. This doesn't make the stock a "gamble" any more or less than a dividend-paying stock. It just means that your returns are in the form of stock price appreciation, rather than dividends. And if the company has good growth prospects that require capital investment, shareholders are much better off with the company reinvesting profits, rather than paying out dividends and then having to figure

  • 'that shorts lost another $1.5 billion today'

    The only short sellers that lost money are the ones that bought to cover. Anyone with sufficient balls and resources to care to short Musk at any price probably sold more today.. surely didn't cover.

    A short is only a loss when either you have insufficient margin and are forced to or you buy to cover, otherwise there's no loss.

    • Well, you're still paying interest on the stock you borrowed to short it, so IMHO yes, there is a loss. If the stock isn't going down you're losing money every day.

  • I'll admit to not looking all that close to Tesla's numbers but I'm getting the impression that Tesla is making more money on batteries than cars.

    Since Tesla took on SolarCity assets they gained the solar panel and battery production. There's been problems with their solar panel products but the battery packs seem to be doing well. Obviously every Tesla car sold has batteries included.

    I'm seeing a lot of growth potential in the battery market if Tesla can find enough raw material at low enough prices. Th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pezpunk ( 205653 )

      not at all. Tesla makes about 20% profit on each car sold. since they're expanding like mad (building multiple gigafactories as well as charging infrastructure and so on), their bottom line is generally break-even at best, but that's to be expected from a company expanding at 40% sales/revenue per year.

  • So a $860 million loss is suddently first annual profit. GOT IT!

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