Delivering on the hype?
Another year, another set of delivery & production numbers from Tesla. The electric vehicle maker may have had a record year on the stock market — with its share price rising more than 570% — but what about its actual operational performance?
On Saturday Tesla reported that the company had delivered a little over 180,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter — leaving them just shy of half a million vehicles delivered for the year. That's a new high for Tesla, and it seems to have pleased investors, with the share price up another 4% this week.
As solid as those numbers are, it's still hard to marry them with the valuation being ascribed to Tesla at the moment. At its current share price Tesla is worth about the same as the next 8 automakers combined. Taking just one of those rivals — Volkswagen Group — as an example highlights just how much smaller Tesla still is in terms of cars sold. For the 11 months January-November, Volkswagen Group delivered 8.3 million vehicles, including 1.5 million Audis and 241k Porsches.
2020 was a very good year for Tesla's actual business, and an obscenely good year for its share price, but selling and delivering 180,000 cars will eventually need to be done in a month, or a week, for Tesla to live up to its great expectations.
