Tesla’s Cash Shows the Need for Speed
The electric-car maker’s latest quarterly numbers show it needs to boost customer deposits in a hurry.
Faster, please.
Photographer: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg
It took Tesla Inc. longer than usual to release its first-quarter results Wednesday evening. One can see why.
As the sales numbers foreshadowed (again, with an unusual delay), revenue dropped more than a third versus the prior quarter, although it was still up a third over a year earlier. Automotive gross profit margin came in at just under 20 percent after stripping out zero-emission vehicle credits, down from around 24-25 percent in the prior two quarters and the lowest in a year. The loss per share was double the consensus estimate, despite frantic cuts to those estimates in recent weeks. Free cash flow, which reached around $909 million into the black in the last quarter of 2018, swung to a burn of roughly the same magnitude.