Tesla Vehicle Deliveries Tumble After China Factory Shutdown
A string of record quarterly deliveries came to an end in the second quarter, when Tesla handed over 254,695 vehicles to customers.
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Tesla Inc. vehicle deliveries fell quarter-over-quarter for the first time in more than two years, reflecting an extended shutdown in China, supply-chain disruptions and challenges associated with opening two new factories.
Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker said Saturday that it had delivered 254,695 vehicles to customers in the three months ended in June, down from 310,048 in the prior quarter. Deliveries were up roughly 27% from last year’s second quarter, when Tesla handed over 201,304 vehicles.
Analysts surveyed by FactSet forecast that Tesla would deliver around 264,000 vehicles in the second quarter. Many analysts in recent weeks had lowered their expectations after the company had to temporarily shut down its largest factory, in Shanghai, because of local Covid-19 restrictions. Tesla also has had trouble getting its new factories in Germany and Texas up to speed, Mr. Musk has said, calling the plants “gigantic money furnaces.”
The company produced 258,580 vehicles in the second quarter, down from 305,407 in the first quarter and up from 206,421 in last year’s second quarter. “June 2022 was the highest vehicle-production month in Tesla’s history,” the company said.
As recently as April, Mr. Musk had been sanguine about Tesla’s outlook, saying the company likely would produce more than 1.5 million vehicles in 2022, up some 60% over last year. Wall Street now believes Tesla could struggle to hit 1.4 million.
The decline in deliveries, which include cars that Tesla has sold or leased out, is poised to weigh on the company’s second-quarter earnings, scheduled for July 20. Analysts expect Tesla in a few weeks to report roughly $2 billion in quarterly profit, up from around $1.1 billion during the year-earlier period but down from its US$3.3 billion record in the first quarter.
The auto maker’s bottom line is likely to be dented by a roughly $475 million bitcoin-related impairment, according to Credit Suisse. Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in early 2021, when the cryptocurrency was trading above $28,000. The price of bitcoin fell below $17,700 in mid-June, according to CoinDesk. The company’s disclosed accounting methodology factors in the lowest market price of bitcoin since the asset was acquired.
Tesla shares lost more than a third of their value in the first six months of 2022. On April 26, the stock dropped more than 12%, its biggest one-day retreat in more than a year after Twitter Inc. accepted Mr. Musk’s $44 billion bid to take over the social-media company. Mr. Musk initially said he would rely on a bank loan backed by some of his Tesla shares to finance the deal. The following month, he adjusted his financing plan to include more equity instead.
Mr. Musk himself recently took a notedly multiday pause from posting on Twitter, where he often opines on Tesla and other matters. He returned to posting on the platform Friday.
Tesla delivered roughly 238,533 Model 3 sedans and Model Y compact sport-utility vehicles combined during the second quarter, up from 199,409 of those models a year earlier. It delivered 16,162 of its higher-end models—Model S sedans and Model X sport-utility vehicles—up from 1,895 during last year’s second quarter.
The company, like many rivals, has been increasing prices for its cars as it faces higher supply costs. U.S. customers who ordered the long-range version of Tesla’s Model Y compact sport-utility vehicle in late June could expect to pay roughly $68,000, or around $14,000 more than they would have if they ordered the model a year earlier, according to Bernstein Research.
Though consumer demand has held strong—buyers often face monthslong waits for new Teslas—Mr. Musk has expressed growing concern about the global economy. Tesla has let go hundreds of employees in recent weeks, part of cuts that Mr. Musk has indicated could touch 10% of the company’s salaried workforce.
The company, he said in an email to employees last month, had “become overstaffed in many areas.” He has since delivered mixed messages about how those cuts would affect Tesla’s overall staffing level. Tesla is also dealing with other labor issues, including a new lawsuit filed Thursday in California state court by current and former employees alleging racial harassment and discrimination. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment about the case.
Supply-chain disruptions and their ripple effects have caused many auto makers to operate less efficiently, according to consulting firm AlixPartners LLP. As of the fourth quarter, auto makers in the U.S. employed 29 people for every thousand vehicles they produced in 2021, up around 31% from a year earlier, the firm said.
For all of its recent disruptions, Tesla is likely to be the only major auto maker to increase U.S. sales in the first half of the year, from a year earlier, according to research firm Cox Automotive. Overall, sales of new vehicles in the U.S. during the first six months of 2022 were expected to have fallen about 17% from a year earlier, the firm said.
General Motors Co. said Friday that it built about 95,000 vehicles without certain parts and had to set the cars aside instead of shipping them to dealers. Its U.S. sales for the first half of the year were down nearly 18%.
Tesla’s in-house software engineering expertise made it more adept than many rivals at adjusting to a global shortfall of semiconductors. That know-how, paired with battery expertise, is likely to benefit the company as a global shift toward electric vehicles strains supply chains, UBS analysts said in a recent note.
“Tesla’s supply chain is structurally superior vs. peers in the mission-critical areas of semiconductors, battery cells and battery raw materials,” the analysts wrote last month. “Tesla is likely to keep all competitors at a stable or even growing distance in terms of absolute growth and profitability.”
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A sharp rebound in tourism in Europe’s sunbelt powers its economic rebound as core manufacturing centres struggle to recover
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Europe’s economy has a north-south divide—and now it’s the poorer south that is powering the region’s return to growth.
Southern Europe, which for decades has had lower growth, productivity and wealth than the north, powered an upside-down recovery on the continent at the start of the year. Buoyant tourism revenue around the Mediterranean helped to offset sluggishness in Europe’s manufacturing heartlands.
The south’s transformation from laggard into growth engine reflects both a rapid rebound in visitor numbers from the collapse during the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of blows the continent’s large manufacturing sector has suffered, from surging energy prices to trade conflicts.
Now growth in the south is more than offsetting the north’s manufacturing malaise: As a whole, the eurozone economy grew at an annualised rate of 1.3% in the first quarter, ending nearly 18 months of economic stagnation in a sign that the currency area is recovering from the damage done by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was the eurozone’s strongest performance since the third quarter of 2022, and approached the U.S. economy’s 1.6% first-quarter growth rate, which was a slowdown from a racy pace of 3.4% at the end of last year.
In the 2010s, Germany helped to drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods. Between 2021 and 2023, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contributed between a quarter and half of the European Union’s annual growth, according to a report last year by French credit insurer Coface —a trend now confirmed and amplified in the latest data.
In the first quarter, Spain was the fastest-growing of the big eurozone economies. It and Portugal recorded growth of 0.7% in the three months through the end of March from the previous quarter, while Italy’s economy grew by 0.3%. France and Germany both grew by 0.2%, the latter rebounding from a 0.5% quarter-on-quarter contraction at the end of last year.
This means Germany’s economy has grown by 0.3% in total since the end of 2019, compared with 8.7% for the U.S., 4.6% for Italy and 2.2% for France, according to UniCredit data.
In Spain, strong growth “seems to have been entirely due to strong tourism numbers,” said Jack Allen-Reynolds, an economist with Capital Economics. Tourism accounts for around 10% of the economies of Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal.
The euro rose by about a quarter-cent against the dollar, to $1.0725, after the latest growth and inflation data were published.
The recovery comes as the European Central Bank signals it is preparing to reduce interest rates in June after a historic run of increases since mid-2022 that took it the key rate to 4%. Inflation in the eurozone remained at 2.4% in April, while underlying inflation cooled slightly, from 2.9% to 2.7%, according to separate data published Tuesday.
“The ECB hawks will point to the strong GDP number as [an] argument that ECB can take its rates lower gradually,” said Kamil Kovar, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The eurozone economy has flatlined since late 2022 as Russia’s attack on its neighbor sent food and energy prices soaring in Europe and sapped business and household confidence. Gross domestic product fell in both the third and fourth quarters of last year, meeting a definition of recession widely used in Europe, but not in the U.S.
Southern Europe is one of only a handful of regions where international tourist arrivals returned to pre pandemic levels last year, according to United Nations data. Tourism revenue across the EU was one-quarter higher in the three months through the end of last June than in the same period in 2019, according to Coface data.
The recovery in international tourism was “notably driven by the arrival of many Americans who…were able to take advantage of favorable exchange rates,” Coface analysts wrote. “On the other hand, the end of the zero-Covid policy in China has initiated a gradual return of Chinese tourists, although remaining below 2019 levels.”
In Portugal, the number of foreign tourists hit a record of more than 18 million last year, up 11% compared with the prepandemic year of 2019, official data showed in January. American tourists in particular have returned to Europe in force.
Tourist numbers in Asia Pacific and the Americas continued to lag 2019 levels by 35% and 10% last year, respectively, the data show.
It is unclear how much further the tourism boom can run, but economists expect the region’s economic recovery to strengthen later this year as cooling inflation boosts household spending power and lower energy costs aid factory output.
Recent surveys point to an improved outlook for growth. Consumer confidence has risen to its highest level in two years, and a leading business-sentiment index has shown steady improvement from the start of 2024.
“We think that the combination of a robust labor market, comparatively strong wage hikes and lower inflation compared with last year will finally lead to a moderate recovery in consumer spending in the next few quarters,” said Andreas Rees , an economist with UniCredit in Frankfurt.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
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