Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders letter for the third quarter of 2023 after market close today.
We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.
Tesla Q3 2023 earnings expectations
As we reported in our Tesla Q3 2023 earnings preview earlier today, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $24.256 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.73 per share.
These are the averages of the expectations, but this quarter, the expectations have quite a wide range as Wall Street is trying to figure out how big of an impact the factory shutdowns and price reductions will have on Tesla’s financial performance.
Now, did Tesla meet, beat, or miss the expectations?
Tesla Q3 2023 financial results
Just after the market close today, Tesla released its financial results and confirmed that it did meet expectations with earnings of $0.66 per share (non-GAAP) and revenue with $23,350 billion during the last quarter.
Despite the earnings miss, Tesla argues in the release that it is able to stomach the price drop fairly well by reducing costs:
Our cost of goods sold per vehicle4 decreased to ~$37,500 in Q3. While production cost at our new factories remained higher than our established factories, we have implemented necessary upgrades in Q3 to enable further unit cost reductions. We continue to believe that an industry leader needs to be a cost leader.
Quarter-to-quarter, Tesla’s gross margin only went down from 18.2% to 17.9% despite the price drops.
Tesla is still free cash flow positive with $0.8 billion added this quarter and the company now sits comfortably on over $26 billion in the bank.
We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):
Here’s Tesla’s Q2 2023 shareholder presentation in full:
Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q3 2023 results: