7:49 am, January 4, 2023
Tesla shares have dropped by more than 12 per cent on the first full day of trading in 2023 after the firm failed to meet 2022 delivery targets.
The company’s stock tumbled by $15.08 to $108.10 on Monday (Jan 2) – its worst day on the stock market since September 2020.
It’s now down to just under 70 per cent since the start of last year.
Tesla’s market value, according to FactSet, slid to 341bn US dollars (£284bn), down from over one trillion dollars as recently as April.
Tesla said on Monday that it sold a record 1.3m vehicles last year, but the number fell short of Elon Musk’s pledge to grow deliveries by 50 per cent nearly every year.
The 2022 figure topped the prior record of 936,000 vehicles delivered in 2021, but it was shy of the 1.4m needed to reach the company’s 50 per cent growth target.
Sales grew 40 per cent year over year, while production climbed 47 per cent to 1.37m.
The shortfall came despite a major year-end sales push that included rare 7,500 dollar (£6,260) discounts in the US on the Models Y and 3, the company’s top-selling models.
Price cuts have also been seen in the UK, as reported by Electrifying.com yesterday (Jan 3).
Analysts said that Tesla also offered discounts in China, leading some to question whether demand for the company’s vehicles is softening.
Tesla also had to deal with rising cases of novel coronavirus in China, which hampered production at its Shanghai factory.
Cowen and Co analyst Jeffrey Osborne expected investors to focus on missing the delivery target, but he only saw modest negative reaction ‘following acute weakness the past few weeks on production cuts in China and discounting’.
Osborne wrote in a note on Tuesday that investors will need to see stability in profit margins despite lower prices, and demand and order trends showing resumed growth this year for the stock to get further support.
In an apparent effort to shore up the stock price, Tesla announced on Monday that it would hold an investor day event on March 1 at its factory near Austin.
Investors will be able to see Tesla’s production line, discuss expansion plans and see the platform that will go beneath Tesla’s next generation of vehicles.
The Tesla stock decline has also cost Musk billions, bumping him out of the top spot for the world’s wealthiest person, according to Forbes.
Also playing into the stock drop is Musk’s 44bn dollar (£36.7bn) purchase of Twitter and his sale of Tesla stock to help fund the purchase.
Musk sold another 2.58bn dollars (£2.15bn) worth of Tesla stock last month and has sold nearly 23bn dollars (£19bn) worth of his car company’s shares since April, when he started building a position in Twitter.
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