Tesla (TSLA) releases Q3 2020 results: destroys both revenue and profit expectations

Fred Lambert | Oct 21 2020 - 4:11 pm PT

Tesla (TSLA) has released its financial results and shareholders letter for the third quarter of 2020 after market close today.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.

As we reported in our Q3 earnings preview post yesterday, the market had high expectations for Tesla this quarter after the company confirmed record deliveries earlier this month..

Wall Street was expecting revenue of about $8.2 billion for the quarter and a gain of $0.55 per share.

Tesla managed to destroy expectations with $8.7 billion in revenue and a gain of $0.76 per share (Non-GAAP).

The market liked Tesla’s expectation beat with a 4% jump in after-hours trading, thanks to $800 million in profits this quarter..

Tesla reported in the shareholder letter:

The third quarter of 2020 was a record quarter on many levels. Over the past four quarters, we generated over $1.9B of free cash flow while spending $2.4B on new production capacity, service centers, Supercharging locations and other capital investments. While we took additional SBC expense in Q3, our GAAP operating margin reached 9.2%.

The automaker ended the quarter with a new record of $14.5 billion cash position in the bank.

With those results in Q3, Tesla has now achieved an operating margin of 6.3% over the last year:

For the trailing 12 months, we achieved an operating margin of 6.3%. We expect our operating margin will continue to grow over time, ultimately reaching industry-leading levels with capacity expansion and localization plans under way.

Here’s the summary of Tesla’s Q3 2020 financial results:

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 Tesla’s Q3 2020 shareholder letter and presentation in full:

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Here’s Tesla’s Q&A webcast for the quarter: