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Tesla (TSLA) releases Q4 results: beat on revenue – deliver a little lower on profit

After market close today, Tesla released its financial results and shareholders letter for the fourth quarter and full year 2018.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results and shareholders letter.

As we reported in our preview post, Wall Street was expecting revenue of about $7.014 billion for the quarter and a gain of about$2.08 per share.

For the fourth quarter, Tesla announced that it made $7.2 billion in revenue and earnings of $1.98 per share (non-GAAP).

They delivered GAAP net income of $139 million during the last 3 months of 2018.

Profits were down from last quarter, but it was something that was anticipated due to Tesla starting deliveries of the less expensive Mid-Range Model 3 during the last quarter.

Surprisingly, Tesla says that “Model 3 GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin remained stable at >20% in Q4.”

Tesla’s cash position increased in the quarter and they now have around $3.7 billion in the bank.

While the focus is on Model 3 and Tesla’s automotive business, Tesla Energy also had a strong quarter. The company says that “energy storage deployments reached 225 MWh, a decrease of 6% sequentially, and up 57% compared to Q4 2017.”

They deployed 73 MW of retrofit solar systems.

One of the most surprising of Tesla’s projections for 2019 is capital expenditures of only $2.5 billion for the year.

Considering the list of things they want to accomplish in 2019, it is an exceptionally low estimate.

On the unsurprising side, deliveries are expected to be way up in 2019. In total, Tesla is “expecting to deliver 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles” this year.

The automaker is also guiding an extremely high production rate to exit the year with the ability to “produce 10,000 Model 3 vehicles per week on a sustained basis” between Fremont and Gigafactory 3.

Here we will be posting our follow-up posts about the earnings and conference call 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

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