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Tesla Drums Up Workers In Effort For Record 3Q Car Deliveries – Report

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is again drumming up his employees as the end of the third quarter gets closer, urging workers to produce and sell as many electric cars as possible before September 30, Bloomberg reports.

“We have a shot at a record quarter for vehicle deliveries, but will have to rally hard to achieve it,” said Tesla’s (TSLA) Musk in an internal email in the US on Sunday seen by Bloomberg. “This is the most number of vehicles per day that we’ve ever had to deliver.”

Musk has made a habit of sending end-of-quarter staff emails to help accelerate productivity as well as to send a signal to investors. Tesla delivered a record 112,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic dented consumer spending on big-ticket items like cars, according to the report.

“Please consider vehicle deliveries to be absolute top priority,” Musk said in the email, which was titled ‘All hands on deck!’. “It’s also extremely important that we keep factory output as high as possible over the remaining 10 days. This is vital for the California market.”

The electric car maker seeks to deliver half a million vehicles in 2020, and has delivered roughly 179,000 through the first half.

Tesla makes the Model S, X, 3 and Y at its California automotive plant and the Model 3 at its gigafactory in Shanghai. The company plans to ship China-built Model 3 cars made at its Shanghai factory to other countries in Asia and Europe and will likely start mass production of those vehicles in the fourth quarter, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month according to the report.

The production plea comes as investors are eagerly awaiting Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting on September 22 and its first-ever so-called ‘Battery Day’.

TSLA is up a whopping 428% so far this year, leaving analysts sidelined on the stock with a Hold consensus. The $312.73 average analyst price target now implies 29% downside potential in the shares over the coming 12 months.

Nonetheless, five-star analyst Daniel Ives at Wedbush last week ramped up the stock’s price target to $475 from $380, saying that Tesla’s production and demand trajectory in China remains robust and stronger than expected for 3Q with “clear momentum heading into year-end”.

Commenting on Battery Day next week, Ives said he expects Tesla to announce a number of new potential “game changing” battery developments, but he still kept a Hold rating on the stock. (See Tesla’s stock analysis on TipRanks)

“We believe the company is getting closer to announcing the million mile battery at this highly anticipated event,” Ives wrote in a note to investors. “In our opinion this battery technology will be very advanced, potentially last for decades, withstand all types of weather/terrain, and be another major milestone for the Tesla ecosystem.”

“Another linchpin to Tesla’s battery innovations and the Street’s focus of the upcoming Battery Day will be reducing battery production costs on a trajectory to the key $100/kWh threshold as this would give Tesla much more financial flexibility around pricing on current and future EV models with price parity,” he added.

Tesla stock price prediction of $312.73

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Sharon Wrobel
Sharon Wrobel is a journalist and writer with two decades of experience covering financial news in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in global publications including The Financial Times, Bloomberg and The Jerusalem Post.

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