On October 24th Beijing time, Tesla released its third quarter 2024 financial report after the US stock market closed. Due to the unexpected improvement in Tesla's profitability reflected in the financial report, which surged nearly 13% after hours, multiple institutions have raised Tesla's target price.
According to the financial report, Tesla's revenue in the third quarter increased by 8% year-on-year, reaching $25.18 billion, thanks to growth in vehicle delivery, energy, services, and other businesses; The gross profit for the same period was 5 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 20%, with an operating profit of 2.72 billion US dollars and an operating profit margin of 10.8%; Non GAAP net profit was $2.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8%. Cash and investments increased by $2.9 billion month on month to $33.65 billion, a year-on-year increase of 29%.
Despite facing many competitors in the Chinese market, Tesla's total sales in the global market have maintained a relatively stable growth. The Cybertruck, which is currently climbing production capacity, has also contributed significantly to sales. According to data released by Cox Automotive, the Tesla Cybertruck ranks third on the US electric vehicle sales chart.
During the reporting period, the global delivery of electric vehicles in the third quarter of 2024 was approximately 463000 units, a year-on-year increase of 6% and a month on month increase of 4%. Two days ago, Tesla produced its 7 millionth complete vehicle worldwide. According to data disclosed by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, Tesla's cumulative retail sales in China reached 462000 vehicles in the first three quarters, a year-on-year increase of 6.1%, with a market share of 6.5%, second only to BYD (34.6%) and Geely (7.4%).
Affected by intensified market competition, the average selling price of Tesla Model S/3/X/Y has decreased. However, Tesla has once again demonstrated its strong ability to reduce costs and increase efficiency, lowering bicycle costs to improve profitability while maintaining diversified business development. As a result, Tesla's GAAP net profit for the third quarter was $2.17 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17%; Non GAAP net profit was $2.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8%. It is reported that Tesla's cost of bike sales (COGS) has dropped to a historic low of approximately $35100.
According to official sources, Tesla is preparing to launch new models, and the previously mentioned more economical models will begin to be launched in the first half of 2025. The Semi electric commercial vehicle factory is also under construction as planned, and the new factory will be offline by the end of 2025. Tesla CEO Musk predicts that car production will increase by 20% to 30% by 2025, and expects the production scale of Cybercab to significantly expand by 2026.
However, regarding the progress of the Roadster, Musk stated that the design of the vehicle is still being finalized and the delay is for more important purposes, implying that the new Roadster project has been put on hold for now.
Electric vehicles are just the foundation of Tesla's business, while artificial intelligence and autonomous driving are the more important value extension chains for Tesla. Musk has always emphasized that Tesla's corporate identity is an AI company. Dan Ives, an analyst who has been tracking Tesla for a long time, said that as price cuts have become a thing of the past, Tesla has demonstrated its ability to expand its profit margins as the company continues to transition towards artificial intelligence/FSD in the coming years.
The latest financial report shows that in the third quarter, Tesla's artificial intelligence training computing power increased by more than 75%. During the reporting period, Tesla released the FSD fully autonomous driving capability (Driver Supervision Edition) V12.5 version. Thanks to the increase in data and training volume, as well as a fivefold increase in parameter count, the safety and comfort of this version of FSD's fully autonomous driving capability have been enhanced. Musk expects that the intervention interval mileage of the FSD V13 version will increase by 5-6 times compared to the V12.5 version.
At present, the FSD fully autonomous driving capability (regulatory version) has accumulated over 3.2 billion kilometers of mileage, of which 50% comes from the V12.5 version. Tesla's Texas Gigafactory has deployed 29000 H100 clusters and is expected to reach a capacity of 50000 H100 clusters by the end of October.
At the "We, Robot" launch event two weeks ago, Musk stated that all Tesla produced Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y models, and Cybertruck will be compatible with unsupervised FSD full autonomous driving capabilities, and it is expected to achieve unsupervised full autonomous driving capabilities in Texas and California next year.
However, Peter Rawlings, CEO of Lucid, a Tesla competitor, and a former Tesla employee, said in an interview not long ago that autonomous vehicle will not land soon. "It's like refining gold to 99.9999% - the first nine are easy, but the last 0.01% is difficult. I think this will not happen until the 1930s."
As another new business growth point, Tesla's energy storage business maintained a high growth of $2.38 billion in revenue in the third quarter, a year-on-year increase of 52%, and achieved a gross profit margin of 30.5% in the third quarter, a month on month increase of 596 basis points. During the reporting period, the installed capacity of energy storage products reached 6.9 gigawatt hours, a year-on-year increase of up to 73%. The cumulative installed capacity in the first three quarters of this year increased to 20.4 gigawatt hours.
At present, the weekly production capacity of the Raslop Energy Storage Gigafactory in California, USA has reached 200 units. The Shanghai energy storage super factory is expected to start production in the first quarter of 2025, supplying the Chinese and global markets.