Tesla (TSLA) announces up to $12 billion investment for electric car and battery factories in just 2 years

Tesla (TSLA) has updated its capital expenditure guidance to confirm a plan to invest up to $12 billion on its new electric car and battery factories in just two years.

It marks an acceleration of the automaker’s spending in order to increase EV production capacity.

During the conference call following Tesla’s Q3 2020 earnings, Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn warned that the company is increasing its planned capital expenditures.

Now Tesla has released its 10Q SEC filing for the quarter, and it has clarified its investment plan:

Owing and subject to the foregoing as well as the pipeline of announced projects under development and all other continuing infrastructure growth, we currently expect our capital expenditures to be at the high end of our range of $2.5 to $3.5 billion in 2020 and increase to $4.5 to $6 billion in each of the next two fiscal years.

That’s up to $12 billion over a two-year period (2021 and 2022).

Tesla explains that the money will go deploying new production capacity at several factories under construction and in development:

We are simultaneously ramping new products in Model Y and Solar Roof, constructing manufacturing facilities on three continents and piloting the development and manufacture of new battery cell technologies, and the pace of our capital spend may vary depending on overall priority among projects, the pace at which we meet milestones, production adjustments to and among our various products, increased capital efficiencies, and the addition of new projects.

While the company is planning to spend a lot more money, it still plans to remain marginally profitable.

Tesla adds:

Notwithstanding the capital-intensive projects that are in progress or planned, our business is now consistently generating cash flow from operations in excess of our level of capital spend, and in the third quarter of 2020 we also reduced the use of our working capital credit facilities. We expect our ability to be self-funding to continue as long as macroeconomic factors support current trends in our sales. Combined with better working capital management resulting in shorter days sales outstanding than days payable outstanding, our sales growth is also facilitating positive cash generation. We also opportunistically strengthened our liquidity through an at-the-market offering of common stock in September 2020, with net proceeds to us of approximately $4.97 billion.

The automaker listed all the manufacturing capacity it is currently working on deploying:

Electrek’s Take

That’s what I like to hear. Up to $12 billion in just two years is a lot of money, and it’s going to go a long way in accelerating the transition to electric vehicles.

After all the money is spent, Tesla should have the capacity to produce over 2 million electric vehicles per year.

I know that legacy automakers have announced large investments too, but they are generally on a long schedule over five years and sometimes over 10 years.

Tesla is planning to spend the money quickly in order to quickly increase production capacity.

I hope it inspires others to accelerate their investment schedule into electric vehicles, too.