Tesla announced that it will release its Q4, 2021 earnings report after the closing bell on Wednesday, January 26, and Elon Musk confirmed that he will come back to the call and give a Tesla product roadmap update.
Product roadmap update
Last year, CEO Elon Musk announced that he wouldn’t attend the earnings conference call anymore.
However, Musk said last month that he would be attending the next call to give a “product roadmap update”:
Tesla still has a few products customers are eager to know more about, particularly the Cybertruck and Semi.
For example, PepsiCo is expected to receive its first batch of Tesla Semi deliveries at the end of this month. Musk might provide a more solid timeframe for Semi deliveries and Tesla’s progress on Class 8 truck’s production at the upcoming earnings call.
As for the Cybertruck, Tesla had previously stated that it already produced a few alpha prototypes of the all-electric pickup. A few people have already spotted the Cybertruck alpha prototypes in the wild a few times.
A Tesla product roadmap would provide details on the company’s plans moving forward. 2022 is likely to be a big year for Tesla, especially considering its plans to produce vehicles at Giga Texas and Giga Berlin. Giga Shanghai also plans to increase production capacity with an RMB 1.2B ($188 million) expansion project.
Fourth-quarter results are critical
Tesla's fourth-quarter results are critical to validate the third-quarter dynamics that could see the company carving out meaningful share from legacy automakers and claim a disproportionate share of the industry profit pool, Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois said in a note.
Annualizing fourth-quarter production suggests active capacity of 1.3 million units, the analyst said. Adding 50,000 units for the underused Model S/X vehicles and 600,000-unit capacity for Austin and Berlin, total capacity for the year end is close to 2 million units, he said.
Annualized production of 710,000 at Giga Shanghai shows the facility is breaking out of automotive production norms toward Elon Musk's ambition that each site should produce 1 million units. Reaching that number, Houchois said, is not a given due to general capacity constraints.
Citing acceleration in BEV demand and a growing backlog of vehicle orders, the analyst raised his 2022 sales forecast up by 12% to 1.51 million units. This is based on the assumption that the Austin and Berlin factories will start producing deliverable Model Ys in February and April, respectively.
Tesla gets an upbeat call ahead of earnings
Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy raised his target price for the shares ahead of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report.
Levy increased his target price to $1,025 from $830 a share, saying he expects earnings to be stronger than Wall Street has penciled in, but kept his rating on the shares at the equivalent of Hold.
Levy projects Tesla will earn $2.81 a share for the fourth quarter of 2021, while Wall Street is looking for just $2.25.
Beyond earnings, Levy sees four keys to the performance of Tesla shares: How fast the company increases production capacity, the direction of gross profit margins, the introduction of new batteries, and product announcements.
Tesla is starting up two production facilities in coming weeks, one in Austin, Texas, and the other near Berlin, Germany. That will essentially double Tesla’s production capacity.
“With Tesla’s demand exceeding supply likely for the foreseeable future, Tesla’s path of volume will be purely a function of its production,” wrote Levy in his report. He projects almost 1.5 million deliveries in 2022, up from about 936,000 in 2021. Levy also expects the existing plant in Shanghai to boost its production this year.
The start of the new plants could weigh on margins because it takes a while for a huge new facility to begin operating at capacity, but Levy still expects better gross profit margins in 2022. He believes higher vehicle prices can offset any drag from inflation or start-up costs.
Tesla is also expected to debut new, larger batteries, offering better performance and longer life, in 2022. The 4680 cells have a diameter of 46 millimeters and height of 80 millimeters, while the current batteries are 21 millimeters in diameter and 70 millimeters high. Tesla is also redesigning the battery pack for its new batteries, a move that is intended to reduce production costs.
The company has also said a $25,000 EV is in the cards, a product that would open up more of the car market to Tesla, given that a Tesla Model 3 starts at about $45,000 today. Levy thinks that the announcement could come this year.
The reason Levy is sticking with a Hold rating on Tesla despite all those positive factors is the stock’s lofty valuation. The stock trades at 108 times the per-share earnings expected for 2022, according to FactSet, compared with 32 times for the Russell 1000 Growth index.