Tesla\u2019s stock jumped about 8% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the electric vehicle giant reported its steepest annual revenue drop in over a decade.<\/p>\n
Despite softer sales and a growing chorus of skeptics about CEO Elon Musk\u2019s focus on the company, investors cheered its vow to \u2018accelerate the launch of new models,\u2019 likely including more affordable ones like the long-awaited low-cost Model 2.<\/p>\n
\u2018They need to adjust to a new environment,\u2019 <\/strong>Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities financial group, said on the heels of the company\u2019s earnings report. Potentially speeding up the Model 2\u2019s rollout \u2018shows they\u2019re listening,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n Tesla\u2019s first-quarter revenues slid 9%, its steepest year-over-year decline since 2012. While the financial results were short of Wall Street\u2019s expectations, investors are breathing a sigh of relief that the company appears to be prioritizing new vehicles.<\/p>\n Tesla has been facing more uncertainty on Wall Street than at any point since its near-bankruptcy several years ago. Its share price has plunged by nearly two-thirds \u2014 from about $407 at its November 2021 peak to about $145 as of Tuesday\u2019s market close. The stock has held the title of the S&P 500\u2019s worst performer this year.<\/p>\n Tesla remains the largest electric vehicle seller in the U.S., where overall EV sales growth has slowed after a booming 2023. According to industry website InsideEVs, 19 Tesla competitors\u2019 combined sales growth over the past 12 months climbed 18% in the first quarter \u2014 the group\u2019s slowest rate in years as they sold just 102,000 all-electric vehicles altogether. Tesla, for its part, delivered 386,810 vehicles alone in that period, down 9% from the same quarter last year and falling well short of analyst expectations.<\/p>\n \u2018Pessimism on the entire EV marketplace has reached very high levels,\u2019 Mark Newton, head of technical strategy at the financial services group Fundstrat Global Advisors, LLC, said in an email before Tesla reported its earnings.<\/p>\n For the average Tesla investor, the falloff has meant significant financial losses over the past couple of years. The company\u2019s declines have been in China, whose most successful EV automaker, BYD \u2014 which does not sell in the U.S. \u2014 has emerged as a key Tesla rival. Today, they are neck and neck for title of world\u2019s largest EV maker.<\/p>\n \u2018They\u2019re going through a brutal demand situation in China, and Musk is now trying to turn this ship around, which went from a Cinderella ride to a Category 5 storm,\u2019 Ives said.<\/p>\n Facing greater competition, Tesla has been slashing prices to buoy sales, announcing over the weekend that it would discount Models Y, X and S by $2,000 each. It also said this month it would cut 14,000 employees, or 10% of its workforce.<\/p>\n In the last quarter, Tesla ramped up sales of the much-anticipated Cybertruck, but it recalled nearly 4,000 of them last week over a dangerous accelerator pedal defect.<\/p>\n Some Tesla investors attribute the company\u2019s troubles not only to broader EV sales trends but also to Musk\u2019s split focus across the other companies he oversees, especially the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.<\/p>\n \u2018There have been a lot of black-eye moments for Musk and Tesla,\u2019 Ives said.<\/p>\n The tech guru\u2019s net worth has shrunk by billions, though only enough to push him from No. 1 to No. 3 as the world\u2019s richest person. His role in the company will be more formally examined in June, when Tesla investors will vote on whether to reinstate his $56 billion pay package after a Delaware judge struck it down earlier this year.<\/p>\n \u2018A lot of shareholders are using it as vote of confidence for the CEO,\u2019 said Fred Lambert, a journalist who covers Tesla at EV website Electrek. But \u201cin the grand scheme of things, Tesla is not in any danger,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Musk has been working to shift the narrative around Tesla. He now says the company is an \u2018AI\/robotics\u201d company, even though cars still drive the bulk of its revenues. He recently posted on X that Tesla was now \u2018going balls to the wall for autonomy,\u2019 and has placed a new emphasis on rolling out fully automated robotaxis. <\/p>\n Lambert said he recently drove a new version of Tesla\u2019s automated driving technology, which is officially called Full Self-Driving\u00a0(Supervised), since it still requires a driver to remain attentive to what the vehicle is doing. He said the new software marks a leap forward and will further benefit from explosive gains in artificial intelligence in the broader tech world.<\/p>\n Increasingly, Tesla\u2019s investments are going toward autonomous vehicle technology. While it\u2019s not yet clear what the current consumer demand is for self-driving cars, Tesla is positioning itself to have an enormous head start, said Tyson Jominy,\u00a0vice president for data and analytics at J.D. Power.<\/p>\n \u2018Given the number of cars they\u2019ve sold, they\u2019ve got a potential fleet of sleeper AVs ready to be activated by executive order \u2026 when and if that time comes,\u2019 Jominy said. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n Tesla\u2019s stock jumped about 8% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the electric vehicle giant reported its steepest annual revenue drop in over a decade. Despite softer sales and a growing chorus of skeptics about CEO Elon Musk\u2019s focus on the company, investors cheered its vow to \u2018accelerate the launch of new models,\u2019 likely including more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}