Is it just me reading too much financial news or does "beats estimates" sound like it was better than estimates?
Loss was 69 cents vs 53 cents expected.
Revenues beat estimates, though.
Loss was 69 cents vs 53 cents expected.
Revenues beat estimates, though.
Not sure if I buy "got better deals from suppliers" story, but it would be awesome if it was true. Most likely they've hit delays with suppliers.
[0] Q4 2016 update from shareholder letter on http://ir.tesla.com/
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-capex-goal-means-1-bill...
Or they just shifted capex spending so that it doesn't fall on this quarter.
I'm not knocking Tesla for doing this, all companies do this (shift costs and revenue around to meet earnings expectations).
They state pretty clearly that is what happened in the letter.
> we continue to negotiate more favorable payment terms with our capital equipment suppliers, pushing some payments closer to the start of Model 3 production and some payments beyond the start of production
So, the "deals" are that they don't have to pay for certain things until later when they have more cash.
It isn't. If you look at their 8-K, it shows that like 99% of publicly traded companies, cap-ex does not show up on the P&L statement.
Straight from the article.
"Adjusted loss of 69 cents a share, worse than expected."
"Analysts expect an adjusted fourth-quarter loss of 53 cents a share"
Now I don't know what to believe.
Edit: I guess it depends on who's doing the estimating. The linked article says "The fourth-quarter loss, excluding some items, was narrower than the $1.14 a share average estimate among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg."
A more accurate statement would be something like, "The tangible value of the company's assets, as far as anyone can reasonably ascertain with any degree of certainty, declined by 53 cents per share this quarter".
The question is whether the company is making good investments. If you believe its infrastructure investments will provide long-lived, strategic advantages which support the reduction of cost (increasing margins and free cash flow), decreased time to market (making more revenue accessible, more quickly), or other things, these "losses" are hardly bad things. [1]
[1] Of course, this assumes the company has access to continued financing on good terms, which seems to be the case.