
Tesla delivers a record number of vehicles during the first quarter 2017 ~25,000 - davidiach
https://electrek.co/2017/04/02/tesla-deliverie-q1-quarter-2017/
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simonsarris
Much of the gains are coming from a huge increase in the (more expensive)
Model X deliveries.

    
    
        2016 Q1 model S: 12,420
        2017 Q1 model S: 13,450
    
        2016 Q1 model X:  2,400
        2017 Q1 model X: 11,550
    

For guidance, Tesla wrote in their 2016 Q4 letter (dated Feb 22, 2017):

> We expect to deliver 47,000 to 50,000 Model S and Model X vehicles combined
> in the first half of 2017

So they're on track.

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brianwawok
I would assume ahead of track as they should have more capacity this quarter

~~~
simonsarris
Delivery numbers may become slightly compromised as the existing
infrastructure (not just assembly but the whole pipeline of getting them to
customers) is routed to include Model 3 deliveries.

This may make Q2 slightly worse than Q1, making them miss the projections,
even if it makes Q3 really great! Situations like this may be why they've been
including the "in transit for next Quarter" numbers so often.

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bigtimeidiot
Regarding the price of TSLA, perhaps someone can help: If Tesla were to
somehow sell 500,000 Model 3's in 2018, and make a net profit of 15% on each
$35,000 car (very high, the auto industry majors make ~5%), and somehow had
all the capital necessary paid for, and no financing or other costs they would
earn:

500,000 * $5,250 = $2.6 BB in profit

With ~160 MM shares outstanding that's an EPS of ~$16.

At $270/share, that's a P/E of ~17 -- cheap, but not incredibly so.

In other words, if everything goes perfectly, buying shares now would be "sort
of cheap", equivalent to a ~6% return. Obviously, the shares have a lot of
risk.

This is practically best-case. So how do you justify buying at these levels,
with the risks involved? You can't say "growth" without modelling it. Do you
expect TSLA to sell a million cars a year, or more with these types of
margins? Where will the earnings come from?

~~~
simonsarris
I've been holding Tesla for a long time. Currently I'm more optimistic about
the company than when I bought it, which seemed fairly risky when I bought it.

I think the room for growth and market expansion (Important Electric Things
and energy future) is very large. I think trying to compute how the math will
get there is a mistake, short of making sure that they are not going to run
out of money.

Being long technology stocks is a strange game. If you're long IBM or AAPL
right now, you're more or less betting that the future is going to look
_pretty much the same._ It's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks.

There are only a handful of public companies you can bet on (Tesla and Amazon
are probably the most obvious) that are really _betting big_ on the future.
The dividends of these will be unknown.

Think about it this way: If you did your same math, could you have expected or
predicted Amazon's AWS success? If you want to bet on the future, you have to
make sure the company isn't going bankrupt, then you have to look more to the
processes that the company produces, moreso than the [current] products.

~~~
bigtimeidiot
> _I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake_

I think the exact opposite; buying stocks without knowing how much you are
paying for profit is a mistake.

> _It 's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks._

10 years ago Apple revolutionized the tech industry with a cell phone. Now
they aren't a tech company?

> _If you did your same math, could you have expected or predicted Amazon 's
> AWS success?_

Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services
market, and were taken by surprise by the success?

I'm not saying it's easy, but being tricky is no reason to ignore using what
data we have.

~~~
simonsarris
> Do you think the people behind AWS didn't model the potential cloud services
> market, and were taken by surprise by the success?

Yes.

The project was born out of Bezo's edict early on in the creation of Amazon
that everything the company does internally must be able to be turned into a
service. Almost every analyst in 2006 was against the idea and Bezos admitted
it would not be a forseeable revenue stream:

> Stifel Nicolaus & Co. (SF ) analyst Scott W. Devitt notes: "There's not
> going to be any economic return from any of these projects for the
> foreseeable future." Bezos himself admits as much. ... "We think it's going
> to be a very meaningful business for us one day," he says. "What we've
> historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three,
> five, seven years."

From this 2006 story:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-
bezo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-
bet)

In 2011(or 2010?) AWS revenue was still listed in the "Other" column on their
10K, even though it was by then their #1 area of growth.

So yes, I think the scale of the success surprised them. It certainly
surprised analysts who think like you do, nearly all of which expected AWS to
be something between a hobby and a folly (read the Bloomberg article).

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topstriker515
MightySignal | Full Stack Engineer | San Francisco, CA |
[https://mightysignal.com](https://mightysignal.com)

MightySignal | Frontend Engineer | San Francisco, CA |
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okket
.

~~~
danhak
Are VW sales increasing 69% YOY too? Do their cars have an ASP of about
$100,000?

Apples and bananas.

