Tesla (TSLA) stock is sliding to start 2025 following a big fourth quarter delivery miss and posting an overall down year for the EV-maker.
For the quarter, Tesla said it delivered 471,930 vehicles globally, missing analyst estimates of around 510,000 as compiled by Bloomberg. This figure is just barely above the 463,000 delivered last quarter, and below the 484.5K delivered a year ago.
For 2024, Tesla delivered 1.789 million vehicles, missing analyst estimates for 1.8 million and resulting in a total below 2023’s 1.808 million vehicles delivered. This is the first year over year decline for Tesla, hinting that new competition, demand, and global economic conditions may be hurting the company
Tesla stock fell over 3% in early trade to start the first trading day of the year.
For Tesla to report a year over year delivery decline is likely a shock to investors, as it was only a short time ago the company was reporting a 50% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).Though Tesla warned last year that its “vehicle volume growth rate may be notably lower than the growth rate achieved in 2023,” due to preparations to launch its next-generation vehicle at Gigafactory Texas, investors most likely were not expecting an annual delivery decline.
Meanwhile, China’s BYD reported global deliveries of approximately 4.3 million passenger cars in 2024. Though Tesla’s main rival in China said 2.5 million of those were hybrids, a reversal of years past, it still brings BYD’s pure EV total to around 1.76 million – just knocking on Tesla’s door.
Tesla bulls however see this as a short-term blip.
“Looking to FY25, we remain highly confident in Tesla’s ability to accelerate delivery growth into FY25 with 20%-30% delivery growth targets the focus for the Street as TSLA is also expected to launch its lower-priced EV in early 2025 to spur growth for vehicle deliveries,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to investors Thursday morning.
In addition to vehicle growth rate accelerating in 2025, Ives believes increasing uptake of Tesla’s FSD (full-self driving) software, rollout of robotaxi testing and products like the Cybercab will take Tesla’s market cap to $2 trillion and beyond.
“The laser focus for Tesla is the 2025 reaccelerated delivery growth story and FSD penetration with autonomous the grand vision for Musk & Co. Any sell off today on weaker 4Q delivery numbers we are strong buyers,” Ives wrote.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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