Holy moly. Sales fell by more than a third: "Tesla’s auto sales during the third quarter quarter took a hit, falling by more than $2 billion, or 36% from a year ago, to $3.13 billion."
Tesla has sold more cars than ever before last quarter. They are just sold in more countries and Tesla is still expanding. Of course they can't sell a car they send to the UK in the US.
The two billion dollar question: is there unrealized US demand (at the current price points) that they are failing to meet, or did demand drop, and they are losing marketshare?
As others in this discussions posted, delivery times in the US seem to be up, which means that their production is lagging behind demand. As the Shanghai Gigafactory goes online, total production numbers should rise steeply and more cars be available in the US.
The question is: if a car sale in the US makes $X margin, but a car sale in the UK makes $Y margin, and X>Y, why are they selling the car in the UK in the first place?
Not only are they making less money on the sale, but they face higher costs even just getting the car to the UK, meaning that the effective margin on the international is even lower.
Why would you think the UK margin is lower than the US one? When Tesla expands in a new market, they start with the high margin top of the line models, so the margin should be rather higher. Also they have a large backlog in markets that have not been sold to, so they try to roughly equalize backlog across markets.
> why are they selling the car in the UK in the first place?
Pure uninformed speculation, but it seems to me like its about sales pipeline and leveraging momentum. It doesn't make sense for them to fully pump the US dry before then expanding into other major international markets. You want to be entering a new large market on an upswing, not on a downswing. Also, waiting would give a lot of space for other international automakers to catch up in their local markets, since people are increasingly interested in buying EVs today
US have just reduced their tax breaks on Teslas by half, and are going to remove them completely soon. Meanwhile, in Europe more countries decide to subsidize electric vehicles, so European sales might actually have higher margins.
The value of sales fell by a third, though apparently the absolute number of sales did not change much upwards or downwards. (95k in Q2 vs almost 97k in Q3.)
However, the US market is the most valuable market on a gross and margin basis, and Tesla acknowledges that growth in the US has slowed. Many analysts believe Tesla's US market has plateaued, though that remains to be seen.
(And note to anyone claiming that they're only selling less in the US because they want to expand internationally: companies don't sacrifice high-margin sales in high-margin markets for low-margin sales, especially not when the low-margin sales are in markets where they don't have any competition.)
>(And note to anyone claiming that they're only selling less in the US because they want to expand internationally: companies don't sacrifice high-margin sales in high-margin markets for low-margin sales, especially not when the low-margin sales are in markets where they don't have any competition.)
Not true, when they are selling overseas, they first start with higher margin cars only, thus starting to sell in new markets does the opposite of what you're claiming.
