Tesla (TSLA) releases Q2 2022 financial results: another beat despite tough quarter

Fred Lambert | Jul 20 2022 - 1:06 pm PT

Tesla (TSLA) has released its financial results and shareholders letter for the second quarter of 2022 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 Q2 2022 earnings expectations

Earlier this week, we posted our Tesla Q2 2022 earnings preview with Wall Street expectations and crowdsourced expectations.

The Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $16.521 billion in revenue and earnings of $1.81 per share.

The expectations represent a rare quarter-to-quarter decrease for Tesla due to the forced shutdown of Gigafactory Shanghai resulting in about 250,000 deliveries instead of well over 300,000 that was expected.

Tesla Q2 2022 financial results

Just after market close, Tesla released its financial results and confirmed that it managed to beat expectations on both earnings and revenue despite a difficult quarter.

The automaker reported revenues of $16,934 billion (about $400 million more than Wall Street expected) and earnings per share of $2.27 (Non-GAAP versus $1.81 expected by Wall Street).

Tesla managed to increase its cash position by $0.8B to $18.3B during the quarter.

The automaker noted the challenges during the quarter, but it came out strong at the end with still an impressive operating gross margin:

“We continued to make significant progress across the business during the second quarter of 2022. Though we faced certain challenges, including limited production and shutdowns in Shanghai for the majority of the quarter, we achieved an operating margin among the highest in the industry of 14.6%, positive free cash flow of $621M and ended the quarter with the highest vehicle production month in our history.”

The biggest concern is probably the automotive gross margin falling for the first time in a long time, but at 27.9%, it is still amongst the best in the industry.

Tesla’s stock price was up by as much as 4% in aftermarket hour trading.

We will be posting our follow-up posts here 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 Q2 2022 shareholder presentation in full and conference call: