Tesla’s (TSLA) stock price has plummeted this month after a series of events have been perceived negatively by the market.
Today it is rising after Wall Street firm Baird said to look past the headlines and invest in Tesla in a rare new positive note on the company from Wall Street.
Among the recent series of events, the most important was certainly Elon Musk announcing that he was giving up on the idea to take Tesla private.
It led to one of the biggest price drops of Tesla’s stock this year.
But other events brought even more negative media coverage of the automaker at a critical moment as the company is attempting to become profitable.
The media and detractors have also painted Musk’s interview on the Joe Rogan Experience last week as a “meltdown”.
The way mainstream media is treating @elonmusk following the @joerogan interview is ridiculous. Based on those standards, guests are having meltdowns on JRE every week. pic.twitter.com/ANjx1mE981
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) September 8, 2018
But Wall Street analyst Ben Kallo from Baird has issued a new note today in which he suggests investors look past those headlines and “buy even with the drama.”
Kallo wrote:
“While negative headlines around management turnover and executive leadership could be an overhang, we are labeling TSLA a ‘Fresh Pick’ as we believe strong fundamentals should drive shares higher,”
The analyst is particularly optimistic following a Fremont factory tour:
“We recently toured the Fremont factory and came away incrementally positive.”
While it’s the Fremont factory that they visited, Kallo is seeing the Gigafactory 1 in Nevada as Tesla’s main competitive advantage.
He wrote in the note:
“Gigafactory 1 creates a significant barrier for competition and manufacturing capability should be a competitive advantage for TSLA over the long term. We believe TSLA’s Gigafactory enables the company to drive down costs through an industrialization of battery pack assembly and economies of scale.”
Tesla expects that the Gigafactory 1 is going to result in over a 30% battery cost reduction.
Originally, the plant was supposed to produce 35 GWh of battery cells and 50 GWh of battery packs. The company later claimed to have found ways to improve efficiency and increase production capacity to 105 GWh of battery cells and 150 GWh of battery packs within the same structure.
Tesla recently claimed to be at 20 GWh of battery production and plans to ramp up to 35 GWh by the end of the year.
Baird reiterated a buy rating on Tesla’s stock and a price target of $411 per share.
Ben Kallo is ranked #832 out of 4,871 Analysts on TipRanks with a 56% success rate and an average return of 7.3%. He has long been recommending to buy Tesla’s stock:
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