Hey everybody Rob Maurer here and today we are going to be going through Tesla's Q2 earnings report. What to expect for Tesla's Q2 earnings report rather. We'll go through the actual report tomorrow. For audio listeners probably better on YouTube since we'll have some numbers up here and we just have a couple other quick items to start with. So looking at the stock today, Tesla up 1% to close at $293.34 heading into earnings tomorrow. The NASDAQ up 3.0% on the day today.
Alright, the quick news before we get into earnings discussion. This is the Giga Berlin expansion plans. The permits for these which will be published tomorrow. A little bit of this has leaked out already. So to buy us land on Twitter here sharing a little bit of what we should expect tomorrow. Which is a permit for a brand new building here to the north of the factory. It looks like this is going to be a square 700 by 700 meter building apparently. So we don't know a whole lot yet. Well, I guess we do. We don't know a whole lot new from this information here. We'll learn more tomorrow, but interesting to see some of the site plans that should bring Giga Berlin to a production capacity eventually of 1 million vehicles per year. So I did want to point that out quick.
And then before we even talk about any of the earnings numbers, as I say each quarter, the purpose of doing this is to help us contextualize things when we go into earnings. And I think the biggest context that we can provide is that this is just one quarter like we talked about after Q1 earnings last time. This is when Tesla reports earnings, the reason that people care about Tesla's earnings reports at those periods of time is because of how they extrapolate into the future, which causes people to tend to overreact a little bit to how margins look. We really have to remember that right now Tesla is building two new factories ramping up two new factories with Giga Berlin and Giga Texas. And they're also ramping up battery cell production for the first time. So these are things that are going to be impacting and are currently impacting Tesla's margins that are dragging them down and probably not fully considered when people are extrapolating from sort of the level that Tesla is at today. So whether Tesla makes $4 billion, $3 billion this quarter, whatever it is, it really doesn't matter for a $900 billion company.
The only reason it matters is because of that extrapolation into the future. So I would recommend going back and listening to the episode that I published right after earnings last time around because I think that's going to give good context as we head into this earnings report as well. So just wanted to kind of start there, but we'll hop into expectations in terms of the financials here as well. Give me one second to flip over. As we normally do, we've got the trailing 12 months of actuals on the left. And then I've got my forecast and analyst consensus forecast here on the right. You can see the year over year change for what my forecast would end up being. And then what my estimates are versus the analyst consensus. So we're just going to kind of go through and then highlight any key points to keep an eye on as we approach the earnings report tomorrow.
Alright. So top line, obviously deliveries, we already know 466,140 in the past. This used to change a little bit, but Tesla seems to have locked that in where it just actualizes now the same as the PND report. The analyst consensus. This is the average analyst consensus. So it's a compilation, just an average of about 20 plus different estimates. For some reasons, 465,000. The only reason I'm showing that is because it shows that maybe the other numbers haven't quite been updated for all analysts that are included in this consensus or just not updated to match the actual delivery result that we got from Tesla. So could be suppressing these numbers when we look at the average a little bit. So nevertheless, I'm slightly above, I guess, analyst consensus on that. We'll see how those come in.
And then for energy storage, I'm at about 4.7 gigawatt hours or about 4,600 megawatt hours. The analyst consensus is about 3.7 gigawatt hours. So I am 27% higher than the analyst consensus here, which for some reason they're expecting a decline quarter over quarter. It's possible we have seen that in the past. Remember, energy storage recognition depends on when projects are completed. So Tesla could have a quarter where a lot of projects kind of bump up together and are completed at the same time, causing us to see what maybe appears to be a bigger ramp than what happens in reality.
So it takes us a couple of quarters to get those things smoothed out. So it's possible. But nevertheless, I am expecting continued growth from Tesla at about 20% quarter over quarter rate in my forecast. But it's a difficult one to forecast because of that dependence upon recognition of each project. So for energy generation, obviously, this is a pretty small part of business. Tesla's business these days. I'm expecting around 100 megawatts. analyst consensus is pretty similar there. It dropped a little bit in Q1 down to 67 megawatts from 100, basically the last three quarters. So hopefully we see that return to the more normal baseline for Tesla over the last few.
All right, so those are kind of the top line numbers that will drive the revenue. And then obviously Tesla's operational controls will determine margins. So for automotive sales, I'm at just below $21 billion. That's pretty much in line with analyst consensus. As a reminder here, I always do my forecast before I look at the analyst consensus so that I avoid any bias that that might interject into my own forecast, trying to, you know, move around based on what analysts think. So I just do it clean before looking and ironically, both last couple of quarters we've ended up very similar spots.
So automotive sales, $21 billion. Unfortunately, Tesla has stopped distributing the regulatory credit estimate consensus. So I can't tell how much of the automotive revenue from analysts expectations is driven by regulatory credits, which makes it a little bit trickier to compare. But for me, I'm at about $400 million. That's pretty close to the average over the last four quarters. If we look at that, that would be $405 million. So it's a volatile category, as you can see just from these last few quarters. But that's kind of what I'm just going with the average there. I've tended to get these under the last few quarters. So I'm trying to break that habit a little bit since I'm usually pretty conservative with this bucket.
So again, can't tell the analyst consensus there. Energy sales because I do have an extra gigawatt hour here. I'm at about $1.8 billion. They're at about $1.7. So if we look at the bottom line for total sales, really the difference is coming from me expecting higher revenue and energy sales and services and others. So what's most important within these revenue buckets outside of, I would say, energy revenue and how that grows, which will get a better understanding of from really the deployments. Probably the most important thing with the revenue lines would be automotive revenue X credits as we talk about, which will be influenced heavily by average selling prices.
And if we look at the last 12 months, there's been a lot of swings here, which makes sense given the pricing volatility that Tesla has had. So Q2 last year, Tesla's average selling price was about $56,000, a little bit below that, excluding regulatory credits and excluding leasing. So these are all, you know, that same metric. Right now my forecast is for a $10,000 drop year over year. So it just shows how the pricing impacts. Obviously, there's mixed impacts and things like that too. But it shows, you know, the drop that we've seen an average selling price from that period of time.
Now quarter over quarter, it's less significant. Last quarter, we saw, you know, $4,000 drop, $4,000 drop in ASPs quarter over quarter from 51,000 in Q4 to 47,000 in Q1. I'm expecting that to continue to decline. I'm at about 45,000 here for Q2, 2023. So about a $2,000 drop quarter over quarter, about half of what we saw last quarter. Now the primary reason for this is we did see pretty significant price cuts on both Model 3 and Model Y in the United States to pretty much begin the quarter. It was just fixing my camera here a little bit. It was in April, right before Tesla's earnings report actually, they cut prices significantly. So factoring in for that.
And then in addition, which makes things really tricky to forecast from an average selling price perspective, there were a lot of discounts that we saw Tesla do throughout the quarter on inventory. So even though we can kind of track the, you know, design studio prices and get a rough gauge for how much those might decline sequentially, when there are things like discounts at the end of quarter, like what we saw in Q4 or Tesla gave those $7,500 discounts, or when we see discounts on inventory, which kind of vary by model and vary by, you know, even within trims sometimes. When those discounts arrive on the inventory, it's very difficult for us to kind of know how that will affect the mix between, you know, where Tesla is selling cars, if that's coming from the design studio, if it's more coming from those inventory pages that do include the discount.
So long way of saying there's uncertainty on this category, no one really knows. We can put our forecasts out here. And ultimately, this is going to be a huge driver for the rest of the results. But it's, you know, based on every, all the information that I have, this gets kind of where my forecast is.
Now, obviously, the other thing that's going into Tesla's results from an earnings perspective would be the cost of goods sold. So as we have seen average selling prices decline, cost of goods sold have declined as well. So $41,000 last year down to $38,500 in Q1, I'm projecting that to continue to decline and in this forecast showing about a $1,200 decline month or quarter over quarter. Now the reason for that would be we do have higher volume, about 10% higher volume, quarter over quarter. So there's economies of scale that Tesla generates from that. And then as we, as I mentioned, going into this, a big drag on Tesla's entire business right now is Gigabrelin and Gigataxis, getting those factories ramped up, particularly Texas because of the 4680 cell production there, that's been a cost drain for Tesla. And that is hitting their average cost of goods sold. So each quarter that goes by, we should see that become less impactful, which means that there's going to be less of an increase to average selling prices caused, or average cost of goods sold per vehicle caused by the additional costs from those factories.
So if you kind of just diminish those over time, this will return to a more natural level for Tesla kind of excluding those, not necessarily one time, but more temporary type of items as Tesla completes those ramps. And that's what I don't think a lot of people have really appreciated about where the business kind of was a year ago versus where the business is today. So it's been a big drain. That drain is going to continue. Zach mentioned that on the call last time. It's just a matter of the diminishing over time, which hopefully we see.
So basically what I'm saying here is, you know, economies of scale, driving costs down, hopefully Tesla's logistics are improving as well. Zach mentioned there might be some materials, particularly lithium that could provide some cost savings for Tesla, but said that that would probably be more in the second half of this year. So not a whole lot this quarter. So predominantly here, my expectation would be from scale and just, you know, improve cost structures at Berlin and Texas.
All right. So with those two things, those are probably, you know, two of the main buckets keep an eye on. But with this all shaking out, I have automotive profit at $4.1 billion. Again, $400 million of that would be regulatory credits. So that would be, you know, down $100 million quarter over quarter. But in my forecast, you can see that that is all driven by regulatory credits. So otherwise pretty similar, which again, might be a little bit disappointing given the 10% increase in deliveries roughly. But you know, you've got to offset the average selling prices that we see decline. Energy profit, I have at about $231 million. So that's up significantly from the 168 last quarter. And then I have $149 million for services and others getting me to about $4.5 billion in total gross profit, which again, slightly down quarter over quarter. But again, driven by regulatory credits and up 6% year over year.
So again, going back to the 83% increase in deliveries year over year where, you know, there were constraints last year in Q2 for COVID with an 83% delivery increase, obviously you'd hope for a little bit more of an increase on the operating, you know, gross profit line. So it's a little bit disappointing from that perspective. But again, we're just in a different place in the business right now than we were in Q2 last year. So you over year comparison maybe doesn't look that great, but we got to, you know, just kind of remember some of the context behind it, which is again, kind of why we go through these types of things.
All right. So automotive gross margin, I've got a 19.5% again, sequential decline. X credits at about 17.9% energy gross margin, always tough to predict, but I have a small increase there as Tesla hopefully gets more scale.
And then services and others, we have seen pretty consistent improvement. So I'm continuing to project that. Now if we look at the total gross margin here, I'm at 18.1%, I know it's consensus 18.2%. You can see total gross profit pretty much the exact same forecast. Again, just by happenstance, I would say that analysts have been doing a much better job of forecasting Tesla, at least from a specific quarter level, not so much for the long term forecast, but on a quarterly basis in recent quarters, it's just become a little bit more straightforward. And they've kind of figured out Tesla's business a little bit better than we used to see in years past.
That's particularly true on the operating expenses line. This has become a lot more predictable, especially with Elon Musk's compensation plan now being fully recognized. So we tend to see some relatively linear growth in R&D, actually kind of a surprise decline in that last quarter. I do have that returning to growth this quarter. And then I have SG&A slightly growing as well, selling general and administrative expenses. No Bitcoin impairment this quarter.
So total operating expenses at about $1.9 billion, which actually again here. To the exact dollar, or at least to the exact million dollars in line with analyst consensus. So pretty similar operating income forecast of $2.5 billion, 10%, 10.3% operating margin for me, 10.4 for the analyst consensus. So I'm pretty much in line.
The bottom line's a little bit different. So even done at $4.3 billion, non-gap net income at $2.9 billion versus analysts are just below $2.8. So it's a little bit confusing because we've got the same operating income. Why are these numbers then ending up so significantly different? The main driver there is differences in income interest expectations and other expenses basically.
So I'm expecting a little bit more interest income with the interest rates that we have seen recently. Tesla's been actually earning some pretty good money there. There's been some other expenses, which we never really know what's in that bucket, but those have dragged interest income net down a little bit. I'm not expecting that necessarily to continue. So we could see a nice little surprise from the interest income perspective and then taxes as the other thing that kind of affects this line. So they, I think analysts have like a slightly higher tax forecast than I do. And really that's driving the net results to be a little bit different. But when you're in this range, I mean, it's just sort of splitting hairs.
So I'm at 83 cents non-gap earnings per share. I mean, I was consensus at 80 gap earnings per share. I'm at 71 cents analysts are at 68 cents free cash flow. I still need to work on and get better at forecasting. So I don't do a forecast for that right now. Analysts are at 2.3 billion. I would expect it to be a little bit lower than that because Tesla probably added inventory this quarter. We know that production was about 480,000 vehicles versus the deliveries of 466,000 vehicles. So you've got 14,000 additional vehicles, obviously work in process inventory. So could have dragged that down and that could help free cash flow. But generally when you're building more inventory than you're selling, your free cash flow is going to be a little bit worse. If you're selling more than you're building, your free cash flow is going to be a little bit better. So those can happen flow over time. But because this was an increase in inventory quarter, it puts a little bit of pressure on that free cash flow line.
So those are the main things. Again, just contextualizing. This is one quarter, two and a half billion dollars, whether Tesla makes two and a half billion dollars here or three billion dollars in gap net income. Obviously it matters because of what it means for really these numbers and what Tesla's cost controls are. But if we zoom out and we think about Tesla's next generation products, we think about the Cybertruck, we think about FSD and the margins that Tesla can generate from that over time, it's not super consequential. So the reason it matters is because they know we'll take this and they'll extrapolate from it, but Tesla's business is not going to be that simple to forecast. I can promise you that over the next five years, there are going to be plenty of surprises that come in these numbers, which will cause volatility at those periods of time.
So just a reminder to kind of zoom out and take things in stride over the last four quarters now, Tesla's going to have generated about 12 billion dollars and that's helping them finance their growth plans without having to go to the capital markets without having to dilute the stock. And ultimately that's what's most important is being able to continue driving towards those growth plans.
So I'll see here, you know, if there's any questions, just quickly in the chat as we head into tomorrow, I will be doing the normal, you know, earnings day episodes, I guess, two episodes. So we'll do the live stream as the numbers come out, which will be shortly after market close. We'll kick that off right around market close. And then I believe probably 5.30 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow is the earnings call. We'll double check on that, but when the earnings call happens, we'll do the live stream of that. I'll have my notes up so as to not interrupt. And then we'll be reactions after the call as well.
Alright. So did see a super chat here? Let's see. It's a little bit small there, but would it be a better business decision to only allow future hardware Teslas to be allowed to be robots actually enabled to boost vehicle demand? Wow. Future hardware Teslas to be allowed. So I think the essence of this question is basically saying like pick a point in time and only vehicles from that point forward can be robo taxis is my understanding of this question. Sure. I mean, that would help drive some demand for vehicles right now because then there's going to be people that want to be on the other side of that line. I don't see any reason that Tesla would want to do that. It seems a little bit unfair for the purposes of just driving some additional sales in the short term. I would hope that they want to do something like that. But yeah, I guess it would probably help with demand a little bit.
Okay. Just want to quickly check. So here's one. I'll just put this on on screen here. So Robin the analysts are way too low increase in production 10% lower cost will produce $1 non gap. Yeah, it's certainly possible. I mean, I do publish my model on ShareLoft and kind of the purpose of that is to let people go in there and put in their own assumptions. But depending on what your interpretation of the average selling price increases or decreases and various mixed elements and foreign exchange certainly can impact these numbers significantly. And foreign exchange isn't something that I model yet, but has had significant impact on the last couple of quarters. There's a lot of reasons that these numbers can change. I always think it's kind of funny because people will basically just isolate on these two earnings per share and kind of compare those and use those to figure out how good a forecast is. It's really not about that because you could be 10% off on one line and then 10% off in the other direction on another line, which is a really terrible forecast and it nets out to be right on. But it's really more about what's going into it. And that's why we do these sort of preview episodes is so that we understand what is driving the results when we get them because these numbers are important to Tesla's business. But we just have to put that importance in context of all the other things that Tesla is doing. And again, probably the most important part of it is just making sure that Tesla stays on track to be able to fund their growth plans. So yeah, I would love a dollar. That would be great. It would mean that probably Tesla's costs are coming in a lot better than I expect here, which would obviously be really good news for the next few quarters.
All right. So I think we'd probably wrap it up there. Maybe just a couple of quick things that I'm looking out for on the call. Obviously cyber truck, there's been a lot going on. I'm sure we'll see some pictures of that. Hopefully Tesla announces that they've really officially started production and reiterate that they're expecting to have that delivery event this quarter, which would be really exciting. And then just anything that they say on the continued ramp up of really 4680s, I know there's a couple of questions in the say questions about that. So those are probably major items right now outside of FSD that I think are really worth paying attention to. So sure, we'll get that and just always interested in the other general updates from Tesla.
All right. That is it for today, then. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you subscribe and sign up for notifications. You can also find me on Twitter at Tesla podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for earnings for the Wednesday, July 19th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.