Tesla finished the second quarter of 2016 with $1.56 billion Dollars in sales and with an adjusted loss of $1.06 USD per share.
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The earnings report followed what has been a roller coaster month, even by the standards of a company like Tesla that has previously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
The somewhat muted stock reaction immediately after the earnings release is “another lesson that Tesla’s stock doesn’t trade over earnings per share”, said Ben Kallo, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.
“We were in production hell for the first six months of the year”, Musk told analysts during a conference call.
The electric carmaker said it had delivered 14,402 new vehicles in the second quarter, revising up the delivery numbers it had reported in early July, when it said its second-quarter deliveries were “lower than anticipated” at 14,370 vehicles. Tesla ended the quarter producing just under 2,000 Model S and Model X vehicles a week.
“I think we want to postpone anything that’s a heavy capital impact until after the Model 3 production is ramped”, Musk said. “Now our production line is humming – and now suppliers mostly have their sh*t together”.
The assembly line is said to have achieved efficiency improvements, reducing the number of labor hours per vehicle.
In the letter to shareholders, Musk wrote that the design phase of the Model 3 production planning has been completed.
Internally, the vision turning the Tesla factory into a sophisticated machine that cranks out cars is referred to as creating an “alien dreadnaught”, the chief executive said.
Tesla is out to develop advanced artificial intelligence that is narrowly focused on safely maneuvering automobiles, according to the company.
It’s likely to take advantage of new, homegrown integrated inverter technology that Musk promises will be twice as good as what others can produce. US safety regulators are investigating a fatal Florida crash in May that involved Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assistance features. Last week, Tesla finally opened its massive billion Gigafactory, which is expected to crank out tens of thousands of new Tesla vehicles and batteries at a faster pace, with plans underway for more Gigafactories all over the world.
Despite giving tours to press and customers in the past few weeks, many details about developments at Tesla Motors and Panasonic’s “gigafactory” near Reno are still murky, and little light was shed by Elon Musk in Tesla’s Q2 results.
The challenge is not so much in the hardware, which Musk said, is already there.
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“The real question on profitability is, where do we set the dial on growth?” Musk is CEO of Tesla Motors, but also co-founder and current chairman of SolarCity.
