People are watching a Tesla Model Y car in a Tesla showroom in Beijing on January 5, 2021.
WANG ZHAO / AFP / Getty Images
Text size
Head of electric cars
Tesla
delivered a huge 308,600 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2021. It is one record result and should be enough to keep the stock moving early in 2022.
Deliveries in the fourth quarter increased 71% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. For the full year, deliveries reached around 936,000, an increase of around 87% compared to the approximately 500,000 units delivered in 2020.
Tesla (ticker: TSLA) also produced 305,840 in the fourth quarter out of its two primary plants – in Fremont, California and Shanghai – providing an annual capacity of more than 1.2 million units from these two assembly plants. Early in 2022, Tesla will start up with two more assembly facilities. One in Austin, Texas, and the other near Berlin, Germany.
It is difficult to call the direction of a stock over any day or weekly period. But the results for the fourth quarter look solid. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the result a “trophy case quarter” for the company and added in a Sunday report “with the chip shortage a large overhang in the car space and logistical problems globally, these delivery figures were declining.”
Ives is a Tesla bull. He values shares buy and has a price target of $ 1,400 for the stock.
Bulls can expect a positive reaction in Monday trading. Typically for Tesla, strong deliveries lead to strong inventory performance in the period between reporting deliveries and reporting earnings. The Tesla stock has outcompeted that
in seven of the last nine periods between delivery results and financial results.
Tesla shares rose about 22% from January 2, after Tesla reported deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2020, to January 27, the day Tesla reported fourth-quarter 2020 earnings.
Tesla delivered about 181,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2020. Wall Street was looking for about 176,000 vehicles to be delivered at the time of release. The result was about 3% blow compared to expectations. This quarter, Wall Street was looking for perhaps 275,000 units. The reported result is more than 12% better than that. The highest FactSet estimate was 292,000.
Looking into 2022, Wall Street currently expects deliveries of around 1.4 million. That would be a growth of around 50% compared to 2021. Tesla’s management has said their goal is to grow volume by 50% per year on average in the foreseeable future. Given current production and upcoming new capacity, 1.4 million looks like a safe bet as long as the demand for electric cars remains strong into the new year.
Tesla shares rose 50% in 2021, better than the 27% and 19% comparable returns of the S&P 500 and
Dow Jones Industrial Average.
It was a solid result after the huge increase in Tesla stock of 743% in 2020.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
.
