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Tesla (TSLA) releases Q4 2020 results: record revenue of $10.7 billion but misses on earnings

Tesla (TSLA) has released its financial results and shareholders letter for the fourth quarter of 2020 and full-year 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.

Tesla Q4 Earnings Expectations

As we reported in our Q4 earnings preview post yesterday, the market was expecting a very strong quarter with records revenue and record earnings due to the record number of deliveries that Tesla already confirmed earlier this month.

Wall Street was expecting revenue of about $10.5 billion from Tesla for the quarter and a gain of $1.04 per share.

Those were record expectations from Wall Street.

Tesla Q4 Earnings Results

Tesla managed to beat expectations when it comes to revenue with $10.7 billion, but it missed expectations on earnings with a gain of $0.80 per share (Non-GAAP).

The market is not liking the earnings miss as the stock is down more than 4% in after-hour trading, but there are some important silver-linings, like the generation of almost $1.9 billion in free cash flow during the last quarter:

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It results in now Tesla sitting on almost $20 billion in the bank.

Tesla also released projections for 2021, as expected, but the automaker only provided very vague guidances:

“Given the number of significant projects in the pipeline, we have simplified our approach to guidance for 2021, enabling our teams to remain focused on achieving our long-term goals.”

The automaker reiterated a growth rate of roughly 50% except for some years when they could beat that and they expect 2021 to be one of those years.

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 Q4 2020 shareholder letter and presentation 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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