American analysts came up well short in their guidance for Tesla’s March quarter EV deliveries with 18 of them missing — and by a mile — the actual outcome.
It was a huge miss as Tesla shocked investors and analysts alike with its March delivery quarter update.
Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle said it delivered about 386,810 vehicles in the three months to March 31, down 20.2 per cent from the prior quarter and 8.5 per cent from a year ago.
Reuters said that Wall Street on average had expected Tesla to deliver 454,200 vehicles, according to 18 analysts polled by Visible Alpha.
But the impact on the share price was marginal — it ended down around 4.7 per cent in a market where those late Monday fears about bond yields whacked momentum and sent everything sliding.
Even though the fall was dramatic, Tesla did regain the mantle of the biggest producer of electrified vehicles (it never lost it for BEVs or battery powered EVs).
Tesla’s 386,810 deliveries, though, were all EVs — no hybrids or plug-ins.
That easily topped BYD’s 300,114 sales of pure BEVs in the quarter.
That was down 43 per cent compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, but more than 13 per cent above the first quarter of 2023.
BYD sold a total of 624,398 passenger electrified vehicles in the first quarter, up 14 per cent year-on-year while down 33.7 per cent from the fourth quarter of last year.
BYD said it again sold more PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) than BEVS in the first quarter, with sales of passenger PHEVs totalling 324,284 units, up 14.5 per cent year-on-year but down 22 per cent from the fourth quarter of last year.
But Tesla’s performance was the story, with the March quarter performance being the first time since the second quarter of 2020 that its global deliveries have seen a year-on-year decline.
“Decline in volumes was partially due to the early phase of the production ramp of the updated Model 3 at our Fremont factory and factory shutdowns resulting from shipping diversions caused by the Red Sea conflict and an arson attack at Gigafactory Berlin,” Tesla said in its release on Tuesday.
China was a problem with Tesla delivering 220,876 vehicles from its huge Shanghai plant in the first quarter (which included exports), down 3.7 per cent from 229,322 in the first quarter of 2023.
That means China-made vehicles contributed 57.1 per cent of Tesla’s global deliveries in the first quarter, the highest since the first quarter of 2022.