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Tesla (TSLA) releases Q1 results: record revenue of $3.4 billion – still wide losses

After market close today, Tesla released its financial results and shareholders letter for the first quarter 2018. As we reported in our preview post, Wall Street was expecting revenue of about $3.142 billion for the quarter and a loss of about $3.26 per share due to large capital expenditure caused by the slow start of Model 3 production.

The company delivered higher on revenue with a new record ~$3.4 billion and still had wide losses of $4.19 per share (GAAP) ($3.35 per share non-GAAP). We are updating this post with more details from the financial results and shareholders letter.

The market doesn’t hate the results so far with Tesla’s stock being up by about 1% in after-hour trading.

The results compare to revenue of ~$3.3 billion and a loss of $3.04 per share (non-GAAP) during the previous quarter, which was record quarter for revenue, and to $2.7 billion in revenue and a loss of $2.04 per share during the same period last year.

As Electrek expected in our preview post, Tesla Energy did the difference in Q1 to help Tesla beat revenue expectations with over $400 million in revenue during the quarter. That was due to a 161% increase in energy storage deployment from Q4 2017 to 373 MWh – largely due to Tesla finally accounting for the large South Australian project.

The shareholder letter has been embedded in full below.

Tesla’s cash balance dropped significantly during the first quarter, but the automaker ended with still $2.7 billion in cash, which it considers good.

The company reiterates its expectation of net income and positive cash flow in Q3 and Q4 2018, but it still dependent on them achieving a Model 3 production rate of 5,000 units per week, which they maintain will happen by the end of the quarter.

Here we will be posting our follow-up posts about the earnings to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):

Here’s the shareholder letter in full:

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.

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