It Isn’t Just Tesla’s Stock That Needs to Slow Down
Elon Musk boosters and sceptics alike might agree that the car industry’s value leaves little room.
2 min
Whatever your view on Tesla, pulling money out of the car industry right now makes sense.
Two years ago, the world’s top 10 auto makers by market value outside China were together worth about US$680 billion. Now they are valued at more than $2 trillion. Tesla has jumped from third place to an enormous lead, and this month electric-vehicle makers Rivian and Lucid replaced Honda and Ferrari in the ranking. Rivian’s stock has more than doubled since its initial public offering last Wednesday.
This extraordinary surge in market value, which the changes in the pecking order suggest is mainly related to EVs, is almost impossible to rationalize. The earnings potential of a mature industry can’t have tripled. It is possible that EVs will eventually be more profitable than gas-powered ones—Tesla’s 14.6% operating margin in the third quarter showed the potential—but three times as much is a wild stretch.
The more difficult question, one that generates more heat among investors than perhaps any other right now, is which companies are more overvalued. Is it Tesla, Rivian and Lucid, which will have to grow exponentially to live up to valuations that have nothing to do with their current sales? Or is it incumbent giants like Volkswagen and Toyota, which are in different ways struggling to come to terms with EVs
Like simple market-value comparisons—Tesla is now worth four Toyotas!—conventional valuation multiples flag the EV specialists as overvalued. Tesla stock trades at 127 times forward earnings compared with less than 10 for most traditional car makers. Having just started commercial production, Rivian and Lucid don’t even have meaningful financial numbers to compare their $100 billion-plus market values to—just business plans.
But looking further into the future, as today’s record-low real yields on safe assets encourage, it is also easy to see old-school manufacturers as overvalued. The likes of General Motors and Ford have announced eye-catching EV investments funded by their conventional-car profits, and investors have rewarded their boldness. Both stocks are close to decade highs. But they have yet to talk about the challenge of winding down their vast combustion-engine operations. As EVs take market share, a reckoning will begin that may make clearer to investors the costs associated with this technological transition for a heavily unionized industry.
Tesla’s valuation only really adds up if it hits its target production capacity of 20 million vehicles a year by 2030, and at very healthy margins. Elon Musk’s ambition is hubristic given the problems car makers have faced historically when they have approached even the 10 million mark—think of VW’s diesel scandal, Toyota’s unintended acceleration, the unraveling of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance.
Yet it isn’t unprecedented for a disrupter to take a disproportionate share of industry profits for a surprisingly long period, says Philippe Houchois, an analyst at Jefferies who rates Tesla a buy. Ford did so in the 1910s and Toyota in the 1970s. Both companies brought a new simplicity to making cars, as Tesla also wants to. Toyota’s edge in traditional mass-market auto manufacturing persists to this day in the form of industry-leading margins.
Passions run high in this debate, which time will settle only slowly. The one thing that seems clear now is that investors overall are far from adequately discounting the unusual level of uncertainty about what the car industry will look like in 2030. When the fog gets thick, speeding up with excitement isn’t the best response.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: November 16, 2021
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Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Government spending, including Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, has helped drive a gap between clean-energy spending and fossil-fuel investments
3 min
Investments in solar power are on course to overtake spending on oil production for the first time, the foremost example of a widening gap between renewable-energy funding and stagnating fossil-fuel industries, according to the head of the International Energy Agency.
More than $1 billion a day is expected to be invested in solar power this year, which is higher than total spending expected for new upstream oil projects, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Investment report.
Spending on so-called clean-energy projects—which includes renewable energy, electric vehicles, low-carbon hydrogen and battery storage, among other things—is rising at a “striking” rate and vastly outpacing spending on traditional fossil fuels, Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director said in an interview. The figures should raise hopes that worldwide efforts to keep global warming within manageable levels are heading in the right direction, he said.
Birol pointed to a “powerful alignment of major factors,” driving clean-energy spending higher, while spending on oil and other fossil fuels remains subdued. This includes mushrooming government spending aimed at driving adherence to global climate targets such as President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“A new clean global energy economy is emerging,” Birol told The Wall Street Journal. “There has been a substantial increase in a short period of time—I would consider this to be a dramatic shift.”
A total of $2.8 trillion will be invested in global energy supplies this year, of which $1.7 trillion, or more than 60% will go toward clean-energy projects. The figure marks a sharp increase from previous years and highlights the growing divergence between clean-energy spending and traditional fossil-fuel industries such as oil, gas and coal. For every $1 spent on fossil-fuel energy this year, $1.70 will be invested into clean-energy technologies compared with five years ago when the spending between the two was broadly equal, the IEA said.
While investments in clean energy have been strong, they haven’t been evenly split. Ninety percent of the growth in clean-energy spending occurs in the developed world and China, the IEA said. Developing nations have been slower to embrace renewable-energy sources, put off by the high upfront price tag of emerging technologies and a shortage of affordable financing. They are often financially unable to dole out large sums on subsidies and state backing, as the U.S., European Union and China have done.
The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have marked a turning point for global energy spending, the IEA’s data shows. The powerful economic rebound that followed the end of lockdown measures across most of the globe helped prompt the divergence between spending on clean energy and fossil fuels.
The energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year has further driven the trend. Soaring oil and gas prices after the war began made emerging green-energy technologies comparatively more affordable. While clean-energy technologies have recently been hit by some inflation, their costs remain sharply below their historic levels. The war also heightened attention on energy security, with many Western nations, particularly in Europe, seeking to remove Russian fossil fuels from their economies altogether, often replacing them with renewables.
While clean-energy spending has boomed, spending on fossil fuels has been tepid. Despite earning record profits from soaring oil and gas prices, energy companies have shown a reluctance to invest in new fossil-fuel projects when demand for them appears to be approaching its zenith.
Energy forecasters are split on when demand for fossil fuels will peak, but most have set out a timeline within the first half of the century. The IEA has said peak fossil-fuel demand could come as soon as this decade. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, has said demand for crude oil could peak in developed nations in the mid-2020s, but that demand in the developing world will continue to grow until at least 2045.
Investments in clean energy and fossil fuels were largely neck-and-neck in the years leading up to the pandemic, but have diverged sharply since. While spending on fossil fuels has edged higher over the last three years, it remains lower than pre pandemic levels, the IEA said.
Only large state-owned national oil companies in the Middle East are expected to spend more on oil production this year than in 2022. Almost half of the extra spending will be absorbed by cost inflation, the IEA said. Last year marked the first one where oil-and-gas companies spent more on debt repayments, dividends and share buybacks than they did on capital expenditure.
The lack of spending on fossil fuels raises a question mark around rising prices. Oil markets are already tight and are expected to tighten further as demand grows following the pandemic, with seemingly few sources of new supply to compensate. Higher oil prices could further encourage the shift toward clean-energy sources.
“If there is not enough investment globally to reduce the oil demand growth and there is no investment at the same time [in] upstream oil we may see further volatility in global oil prices,” Birol said.
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
