Despite posting $1.1 billion in revenues for the first quarter ($1.6 billion under non generally accepted accounting principles - GAAP), Tesla reported a net loss of $282 million for the quarter. Compared to the last quarter, Tesla made less in revenue, but the loss was slightly less. Tesla credits this to a careful watching of its spending. Tesla notes that its cash on hand - $1.4 billion - "does not include any meaningful cash flow from Model 3 reservations," but a fair chunk of that reservation money was used to repay back a $430 million credit line.
This isn't the big news as it lines up with what analysts were expecting. It was Tesla's announcement of moving its timeline to produce 500,000 vehicles a year from 2020 to 2018.
“Increasing production fivefold over the next two years will be challenging and will likely require some additional capital, but this is our goal and we will be working hard to achieve it,” Musk said in a letter to shareholders.
This is most likely due to the strong demand for the Model 3 which at the time of this writing has 400,000 reservations.
Tesla also reiterated plans to produce 80 to 90,000 vehicles for 2016. In the first quarter, Tesla built 15,510 vehicles - 12,851 Model S sedans and 2,659 Model X crossovers. The latter model has been having a number of issues from windshield suffering from 'double vision' distortion to the falcon doors not closing. When asked about the quality issues during the call with analysts, Musk said he has a sleeping bag near the production line that he uses “quite frequently.” We're assuming that he is watching the production line to see if there are any issues coming up.
Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required), Autoblog, Tesla
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