Hey everybody Rob and we're here and today we're going to go through Tesla's 10Q quarterly filing. We get some more interesting details on Tesla's earnings report and I know it's a 10Q but we'll keep it interesting. We've also got some updates on the Cybertruck and a busy calendar week this week and a couple other items as well.
Alright, turned into a pretty nice day for Tesla stock to start the week off after a rougher reaction to earnings at the end of last week. Tesla today up about 3.5% closing at $269.6. The NASDAQ today only up 2.5% also trailing the Dow and the S&P. That NASDAQ 100 rebalance that reduced the weight of the top market cap stocks in the NASDAQ 100 including Tesla. That took effect today so any benchmarking or front running of that adjustment was probably completed on Friday and this was probably our first day without that impact in quite some time. Tough to know exactly how impactful that was but definitely glad that we are now through that period.
As we look ahead to the rest of this week it should be a busy one. Of course we have the FOMC meeting and interest rate decision on Wednesday. We've got PCE, personal consumption expenditures on Friday. And although Tesla has already reported there are a ton of earnings reports this week which could cause some volatility in the markets. So lots going on that will affect things in addition to Tesla news.
We did also have an analyst downgrade for Tesla today that was from UBS. They downgraded from an outperform rating to neutral based on the growth and the share price that we have seen recently. So they did actually up their price target from $220 to $270 but downgrading to neutral saying that we think the recent strong share performance fully reflects the strong demand response seen after the price cuts as well as a solid execution into 2024. And adding that Tesla remains the undisputed truly global technology scale and cost leader in the EV space with unparalleled software capabilities. However for the next 12 months we think upside risk to consensus earnings is very limited with significant volumes from new product for Cybertruck and affordable model. Back kicking in before the second half of 2024 and with some initial margin dilutive impact. So kind of a similar perspective to what we talked about after the second quarter report especially relating to factory upgrades happening in Q3. Why wouldn't an investor just wait until those are complete and then buy. This seems to be an expanded view on that same sort of logic or opinion. And there's some validity to that but a lot of times stocks react positively to things that we just don't know about or don't foresee. But the reaction that we saw in the stock after Ford's announcement of adopting NACS being a perfect example of that. That was the longest run of positive days in Tesla's history being contributed to by something that you couldn't look at it in calendar and point out when it would happen. Anyway, we'll move on from that but we do have another quick update on Tesla and India. It's a report from Reuters that says Tesla representatives are set to meet India's Commerce Minister this month to discuss plans to build a factory to produce what the company has described as an all new $24,000 car, a person with direct knowledge of the matter, sold Reuters.
Alright, so a couple things out of that. First Tesla talks seem to be progressing, more meetings with other government officials, and then also that $24,000 number is interesting since that was used so precisely in the headline here and is a little bit more specific than what we had previously heard which was a report of somewhere around or under $25,000. But if we look at the report closely, Reuters goes on to say that the $2 million rupee, $24,000 EV Tesla representatives were said to have described in discussions about a potential Indian plant would be 25% cheaper than its current lowest price offering the Model 3 sedan, which sells for the equivalent of just over $32,200 in China.
Alright, so the $24,000 number sounds very specific sounds like oh maybe it's progressed a little bit more, Tesla's got that specific price target but it's really just based off of $2 million rupees, obviously we have a significant digit issue here so if we put this in a conversion calculator, yeah it's $24,400 but it's obviously just in that same $25,000 ballpark that we've heard about for a while so nothing new in terms of that price point or the level of specificity that Reuters is using here which is a little bit annoying considering that they are not only ignoring significant digits but then also rounding down off of that.
Alright, let's move into the 10Q, these are filed after each quarterly earnings provide a little bit more insight on what Tesla had previously published and occasionally some additional disclosures so I went through and will recap the highlights here. One thing I always like to look at is how revenue is coming in by region, we don't get that prior to the 10Q but we can see here how it breaks down between US, China and other international regions and I think here one thing that immediately jumps out is for other international revenue was about $7.9 billion in the second quarter up from $3.5 billion last year but we have to remember that there were significant shutdowns in China relating to COVID last year in Q2 so because of those shutdowns Tesla likely prioritized the very limited Gikushang high production more domestically in China last year at this point so China deliveries would have been hurt and also other international deliveries would have been impacted by that as well so that's why we're seeing the doubling here at least primarily why we're seeing the doubling if you shift over to that six month aggregate so the first half of this year it's up 69% year over year so you can see obviously the growth in the first quarter this year which we'll look at in a second would have been much less significant than the 100% plus that we're seeing in Q2.
Because of those factors on the second quarter last year I think the quarter over quarter number is a little bit more informative so I've broken those out here as we of course already knew from the Q2 report total revenue was up almost 7% to about $25 billion but by region the United States was up 1% China up 17% quarter over quarter and other international markets up 9% quarter over quarter. Obviously China sticks out and we've talked a number of times about how this was a record quarter in China but we also have to remember that Q1 did have Chinese New Year which probably had a decent impact on the Q1 China revenue.
Next I would normally take a look specifically at automotive revenue and margins Tesla gives explanations for why margins changed but we already know all those we've talked about them. Selling prices have come down costs have come down but not enough to maintain margins so that was pretty much the whole explanation there. So moving into energy I was curious what Tesla would have to say on margins because we did see such a big jump from Q1 in a Q2 from about 11% up to 18% which quarter over quarter just so happens to be about the same increase as the margins year over year.
We don't get a whole lot from Tesla here but they say those year over year margin increases were driven by changes in megapack revenue and cost per megawatt hour which Tesla says were driven down due to production increases. So definitely what we want to see in the business I think here a simple explanation is a positive because there isn't really anything that Tesla is pointing to and saying hey this was more of a one time item or a unique circumstance really it was just saying production improved costs improved and therefore margins increased so hopefully this is something that can be sustainable or even continue to grow for Tesla through the rest of the year.
Also on energy as we have talked about there is a significant portion of revenue that ends up deferred so Tesla gets paid but they don't recognize it yet because the project isn't finished. They say this deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $1.1 billion.
Looking back to the 10Q from the first quarter that figure was $770 million so their deferred revenue balance on energy grew by $340 million which makes sense in conjunction with energy storage deployed at being down quarter over quarter but the unrecognized or deferred revenue growing by $330 million or 40% quarter over quarter.
So overall I would say the 10Q a continuance of the good news from the earnings report for energy.
总的来说,我认为这份10Q报告延续了能源收益报告中的好消息。
Since we're on deferred revenue I always like to take a look at FSD deferred revenue. Tesla says that deferred revenue related to FSD and ongoing maintenance, internet connectivity, free supercharging programs over their software updates, the grouping of all of these things though predominantly most likely FSD revenue amounted to $3.17 billion at the end of the quarter. That's up from $3.04 billion at the end of last quarter so a little bit of an increase but that increase was actually paired with a drawdown on the prior quarter's deferred revenue balance. Tesla says that in the first six months of the year they have recognized $256 million of the year and deferred revenue balance whereas last quarter that number was only $134 million so by my read, it looks like they recognized $122 million from this balance this quarter. Now it's not necessarily FSD related it could be from those other items mentioned especially because Tesla didn't specifically call this out so we don't necessarily know what margin this would be at which makes the impact a little bit tough to assess but definitely important to know that this was recognized.
Tesla says that of the current deferred revenue balance they expect to recognize $747 million of revenue in the next 12 months that would be an average of $185 million a quarter so a little bit higher than where they have been in the first two quarters this year. As of last quarter, they said that they expected to recognize $679 million so that is increased a bit.
Next, a quick note on inventory. Inventory overall for Tesla, we're not talking about just finished vehicles here we're talking about all of their inventory it's added about $14.4 billion that's actually pretty much identical to where it was in Q1 some moving around between buckets higher finished goods inventory for Tesla this quarter but offset by reductions in raw materials and work in process inventory. So primarily pointing that out because the reductions in those buckets those help with Tesla's free cash flow for this individual quarter.
A couple things on expenses so we talked about the big increase in R&D driving operating margin down Tesla again reiterating in this 10Q that that year over year increase in D was primarily driven by additional costs related to the pre-production phase for Cybertruck, AI and other programs so definitely not an increase that I mind and then for capital expenditures Tesla continues to guide to $7 to $9 billion in 2023 and the following two fiscal years so no change on that guidance.
Finally, a couple of additional disclosures there is a disclosure in here about that handlesblad article that there had been some leaked data about Tesla's safety and autopilot and things like that Tesla said that they are investigating this and working with certain law enforcement and other authorities on unfavorable ruling could develop but again this is a risk disclosure so not anything that people shouldn't have already realized but I guess confirmation that there are discussions there with law enforcement.
And then lastly this is noted in the 10Q but Tesla also filed an 8k late last week on the proposed settlement agreement regarding the return of some compensation from the board of directors for the time period between 2017 and 2020 like we had talked about. I wasn't sure exactly how that would be handled in the financials. I don't think that has been fully disclosed but part of this 8k does note that the settlement hearing would be on October 13th so nothing would be reflected on Tesla's financials until after that date presumably so we'll keep an eye on that.
Alright we're through all of that if any of that was boring well we've got some new Cybertruck photos here an interesting new wrap from Tesla I think John Anderson the first one to share these photos it looks like Tesla put an F-150 style wrap on the Cybertruck. Looks pretty funny there's even a short video of it driving around the test track you can't see too much from either of these but glad to see Tesla continuing to have some fun with these various Cybertruck wraps and maybe some not so subtle foreshadowing on the truck industry.
Outside of the wraps, we do also see the front trunk area it does look relatively small in these photos and pretty heavily populated with other equipment so we might have to temper our expectations a bit on the size of the front but as always with photos like this it can be a little bit difficult to get the true sense of scale.
Outside of the F-150 wrapped Cybertruck there was also a video of the camouflage version from up pretty close shared on twitter by Jan Masoch I don't think there's anything too new here just kind of a quick walk around.
Alright and then last item for today sounds like I'm not going to be saying shared on twitter too much longer as Elon has now started the process of rebranding it to X they have swapped the logo out and Elon's domain of X.com now points to twitter which is pretty cool because if you've got a twitter account your twitter page is now X.com slash whatever it is so X.com slash Tesla podcast that now points to my page and that will be even more interesting as twitter becomes a broader platform over time.
Alright that'll wrap it up for today then as always thank you for listening make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications you can also find me on twitter or X at Tesla podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Tuesday July 25th episode on Tesla daily thank you.