Tesla (TSLA) Q4 2021 earnings preview: Here’s what to expect

Tesla (TSLA) is set to announce its fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 financial results tomorrow, January 26, after the markets close. As usual, a conference call and Q&A with Tesla’s management is scheduled after the results.

This time things should be a bit different, as a product roadmap update is also expected.

Here we’ll take a look below at what both the street and retail investors are expecting for the quarterly results.

Tesla Q4 2021 deliveries

As usual, Tesla already disclosed its Q4 vehicle delivery and production numbers, which drives the vast majority of the company’s revenue.

Earlier this month, Tesla confirmed that it delivered 308,600 electric vehicles during the last quarter.

That’s a new record and brought the full-year total to over 936,000 vehicles delivered in 2021.

The deliveries were significantly above the Wall Street consensus this quarter and the firms have been updating their expectations for revenue and earnings over the month in order to adjust.

Delivery and production numbers are always slightly adjusted during earning results.

Tesla Q4 2021 revenue

For revenue, analysts generally have a pretty good idea of what to expect thanks to the delivery numbers.

The Wall Street consensus for this quarter is $17.112 billion, and Estimize, the financial estimate crowdsourcing website, predicts a higher revenue of $17.416 billion.

Unsurprisingly, the market is expecting a significant quarter-over-quarter increase due to the rise in deliveries.

Here are the predictions for Tesla’s revenue over the past two years: Estimize predictions are in blue, Wall Street consensus are in gray, actual results are in green:

Tesla Q4 2021 earnings

Tesla always attempts to be marginally profitable every quarter as it invests most of its money into growth, and it has been successful doing so over the last two years now.

For Q4 2021, the Wall Street consensus is a gain of $2.3 per share, while Estimize’s prediction is slightly higher with a profit of $2.51 per share.

The earnings are more of a hit-or-miss since it depends on how much Tesla is spending that quarter, and with supply chain issues and cost increasing at new factories being brought online, it could be not as profitable despite record revenues.

Or not. It’s hard to tell.

Here are the earnings per share over the last two years: Estimize predictions in blue, Wall Street consensus in gray, actual results in green:

Other expectations for the TSLA shareholder’s letter and analyst call

As we previously reported, this earnings call and shareholder’s letter is expected to be a bit different since Elon Musk said he will be returning to the call and bringing a “product roadmap update“.

That’s new because the CEO previously said that he doesn’t like to make product announcements on earnings calls.

We expect a lot of the focus of that will be on bringing Model Y to production at Gigafactory Texas and Berlin, updated Cybertruck design, specs, pricing, and timeline, and maybe a few more things if we are lucky.

Over the last few earnings call, Tesla has been using the website ‘Say‘ to gather questions from retail investors and respond to the top-voted ones.

Here are a few of the top ones, which we should expect answers to tomorrow:

• As Free Cash Flow grows well in excess of Capital Expenditures, what will you do with the pile of cash? Accelerate Gigafactories? Accelerate Battery production? Finance your own fleet of Robotaxi’s and Grid Storage? Something else? How are you thinking about this?
• What’s the current volume of 4680 cells? Please update us on progress of in-house battery cell and structural battery pack production.
• Tesla is growing rapidly, is Tesla growing the customer service at the same pace? How do you plan to make better car service with this rate of growth?
• Stock Split: Can we please get a stock split? It has become harder to buy Tesla stock over $1000 for us retail investors. Also, it would be good be part of Dow Jones Industrial index.

What else are you looking for during Tesla’s earnings? Let us know in the comments section below, and join us tomorrow for an extensive coverage of the earnings.