Tesla shares plunge after disappointing third-quarter deliveries
Tesla shares slid 7 percent in early Thursday trades after billionaire Elon Musk’s electric car maker said deliveries rose less than expected in the third quarter.
Total car deliveries came in at a record 97,000 units for the quarter, Tesla said Wednesday. That was below analysts’ estimates of 97,477 vehicles, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Musk had goosed Wall Street’s expectations when he recently told employees in an email that Tesla “has a shot” at delivering a record 100,000 cars during the quarter. Tesla shares jumped 5 percent last week after the email got leaked to the news site Electrek.
Tesla shares on Thursday were recently off 7 percent at $226.17.
The Silicon Valley-based company has set a target to deliver 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles in 2019, which means it needs to deliver at least 104,800 vehicles in its final quarter to meet the low end of its full-year forecast.
“Looks like the 360k bottom end of 2019 forecast is starting to look a bit iffy,” Roth Capital Partners analyst Craig Irwin said.
Tesla is under pressure to ramp up production, while proving that there is sustainable demand for its vehicles and that it can turn a profit, even as traditional luxury car makers begin to roll out their own electric models.
The company’s Model S and X vehicles are facing challenges from the recently launched all-electric SUVs from Audi and Jaguar Land Rover.
“We know of no operational issues that could have prevented TSLA from delivering more vehicles if demand were available,” JMP Securities wrote in a research note as it cut its rating on Tesla shares to market perform from outperform.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, however, noted that Model 3 deliveries are “the linchpin of the Tesla growth story” and that they beat expectations.
Tesla delivered 79,600 Model 3 sedans in the third quarter, beating estimates of 79,470. Deliveries of Tesla’s two high-priced models fell 1.4 percent to 17,400 from the second quarter and came in below analysts’ estimates of 18,829 vehicles.
Tesla said its orders in the third quarter exceeded deliveries and that it was therefore entering the fourth quarter with a backlog.
Separately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday that US regulators are looking into parking lot crashes involving Tesla cars driving themselves to their owners using the company’s Smart Summon feature.