Hey everybody RobMower here and today we've got some new numbers for Tesla out of China, we'll also take a look at Rivians earnings always interesting to see their progress, we've got an update on Tesla energy and a couple other items as well.
Starting off with the stock, Tesla continuing to hold up okay after the Kirk Corn resignation, finishing down 7 tenths of a percent on the day to day to close at $249.70, while the NASDAQ was down a little bit more, 8 tenths of a percent on the day. After yesterday's episode we did get just a little bit more information from Elon on the Xach stepping down, Holmars saying that sounds like he got a job off for somewhere else that couldn't say no to, Elon replying to that saying quote 13 years is a long tour of duty, Zach will spend time with friends and family, then do something else, end quote. So despite what seemed to be a somewhat sudden announcement still signs here of things being amicable.
Alright let's move into the China numbers, we've got new insured vehicle numbers and then we also have monthly numbers for domestic and export sales for July, we'll look at the weekly insured numbers first, so from July 31st to August 6th, 12,800 Tesla's were insured in China, this represents an improvement in the quarter over quarter pace, now through 5 weeks about 44,000 vehicles have been insured in China, which would be an increase from Q4 and Q1, about 28,000 and 34,000 respectively for those quarters, still a bit behind Q2, which was at 47,000 at this point.
So last week Tesla was pacing down about 10,000 vehicles down about 25% for the quarter over quarter trend, that now improves to down just 3000, and less than 10% for that quarter to date quarter over quarter comparison. So this looks like a really strong number and it is a good number but we do have to add some context for the 5th week of Q2, remember that was in early May and there was a holiday in China during that week, that was then actually the lowest week of the quarter, so no surprise to see Tesla gain some ground when that gets added into the comparison.
Alright let's move on to the July numbers, remember we previously had the total wholesale sales for the month, that's the combination of retail and export sales, and the Model 3 and Model Y breakdown for the total figure. So domestic sales came in at 31,400 exports at 32,800, more than a 5050 split towards exports, which is a little bit higher than we tend to see for an average quarter, but not unusual for the first month of quarter, even with the unwinding of the delivery wave. More interestingly I think is that split between Model 3 and Model Y, we don't have it for retail or exports yet that I've seen, we should get that very soon, but for total wholesale sales about 20,000 Model 3's, about 44,000 Model Y's, and this ratio isn't really any different than what we have seen over the last few months, so 32% of wholesale sales in July, Model 3, it's only 1% lower than June and 2% lower than the average so far this year. So no significant drop off yet in Model 3 sales as we continue to watch for more evidence of Project Highland, most of the reports had been for downtime in June which obviously didn't seem to come to fruition, there hadn't been as much discussion in July so, not too surprising to not see Model 3 drop off yet, we'll get a much better understanding of that though when we do get the production numbers for July, which really should be any time now and then of course we have seen these rumors about downtime or shutdowns or switching over production really increase now for August which, you know, we're gonna have to wait more time to figure that out, but between June, August and July I think July probably had the least talk of that sort of a transition happening, but the production numbers when we do get those will give us even more insight.
Alright, next up we've got some interesting reporting on Tesla and API access for developers, of course whenever this topic comes up, it spawns conversations about Tesla possibly building an app store and things like that, could be related but maybe a little bit premature so what the news is today is that standard fleet which is a fleet data aggregator and management software that connects with the Tesla API to collect a lot of that data similar to services like Tesla Fi, but each of these types of things has their own use case.
So the news here with standard fleet is that they seem to be the first third party app that offers official integration with Tesla and a single sign on authorization with Tesla, which as shown here in some images from Tesla, or allow users to log in with their Tesla account and then grant various permissions to standard fleet, they can then get access to the data without ever needing a Tesla account password or anything like that, and these permissions can be controlled directly on Tesla's website.
So really what this is is a more official, better security way of doing things that have been being done, API access for third parties, which is definitely a great step forward and can be a building block for more of those things in the future, but a lot of people see headlines about Tesla and third party apps and think that that immediately means that they can go out and just build an app that's going to be downloadable in some Tesla store on Tesla vehicles, which although would be cool and maybe will come someday and there's plenty to talk about with that, that's not really what this is, at least as of yet. So just wanted to add some context around that not to diminish that this is a nice step forward, but hopefully that helps with some understanding.
Next we've got a quick update on Tesla Energy, Energy Hub today announcing that they and Tesla are partnering to allow Tesla energy customers to directly within the Tesla app enroll in Energy Hub's connected solutions program, which is a VPP or virtual powerpoint program that is offered in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Now obviously we have seen Tesla offer VPP programs in other states, so to me without having all the information, it would seem that Tesla in these markets is favoring a partnership instead of operating the VPP themselves.
This will still allow powerwall owners to be rewarded for any excess energy that they have stored that can be drawn during periods of high need. So the customers will benefit, presumably Energy Hub will benefit, not clear exactly if Tesla will share in those profits, but obviously it does make the powerwall as a product more compelling. If you are a Tesla Energy customer in those markets, definitely feel free to share your thoughts in the comments today.
Alright, let's move on to Rivian Earnings, they reported their Q2 earnings aftermarket closed today, relatively muted stock reaction, so far although they did seem to beat on most metrics, and they did announce that they are increasing their production guidance for 2023 from 50,000 before, now up to 52,000, so not a huge bump, but adding that significant digit which definitely makes it seem like they are a little bit more confident in where that figure is going to come in at.
They also announced some significant improvements on their gross margin, obviously these are still challenging, significantly negative, but from the first quarter to the second quarter, they improved their gross margin per vehicle by about $35,000, and year over year, much more significant improvement than that, so if you look at the numbers on the far right you can see this quarter, their gross profit, mind you not net profit, gross profit was negative $412 million, so across 12,640 deliveries, that's a negative gross profit per vehicle of about $32,500, but last quarter, that was negative $67,000, last year, it was negative $157,000, so still losing a whole bunch of money before even considering operating costs, but moving in the right direction and moving relatively quickly if they could do another quarter with that kind of improvement, that would obviously push them into positive gross profitability, but still a long ways to go from there, because again you gotta cover the operating costs, Tesla probably had positive gross profit for basically its entire history for like a decade before actually net profit started to materialize, and although this was a dramatic improvement, it's coming from a really low bar, losing $67,000 on every vehicle you sell, that's a big loss, and most of the progress is from amortizing it out over a greater delivery number, they lost $500 million in gross profit last quarter, now they lost $400 million in gross profit this quarter, so if you look at it a little bit differently and say that this quarter they improved their gross loss by about $100 million, then they need to do that for 3-4 more quarters to get to gross profitability, that type of progress is more in line with what RIVIIN is guiding for, they're saying that they expect to reach positive gross margin sometime in 2024, so that alone shows that they don't expect to be making these $30,000 improvements every quarter, it gets a little bit harder as they approach positive gross profit, then of course you gotta make enough gross profit eventually to cover your operating expenses, that for RIVIIN this quarter was $873 million, for context that's about 45% of Tesla's operating expenses, even though RIVIIN sold less than 3% as many cars as Tesla did this quarter, that was however down from about $1 billion in this period last year, so making improvement but still a long ways to go, so you've got the negative $400 million in gross profit, add that to the negative $900 million roughly in operating expenses, RIVIIN showed an operating loss this quarter of nearly $1.3 billion, but again, unimprovement over last year's $1.7 billion loss from operations, as for cash, net cash from operations was negative $1.3 1.4 billion, negative free cash flow $1.6 billion, with RIVIIN ending the quarter with just over $10 billion in cash and just over $11 billion in total liquidity, so still sitting on a decent chunk of cash, they did also improve their forecast for EBITDA, now they expect to lose $4.2 billion this year in EBITDA from 4.3 previously, and they lowered their capex forecast from $2 billion previously down to $1.7 billion for the year now.
So those are the financial takeaways, progress, still a long ways to go, but they've got a lot of cash left, and then we'll see if they have anything interesting to say on the call, I haven't had a chance to listen to that as of this recording.
One other interesting detail from their shareholder letter, they did talk about their charging efforts, they talked about the adoption of Tesla's NACS, but they do mention that they continue to plan to expand the RIVIIN adventure charging network, and add NACS to those expansions. As we talked about at the time of those announcements, I think it'll be interesting to see what RIVIIN does because as they are a little bit more sort of adventure-focused brand, it could make more sense for them marketing-wise to have these charging stations in more remote locations that maybe Tesla isn't as eager to service, whereas the RIVIIN might not make a lot of sense, but it might be worth it from a brand-building perspective, at least in their eyes, to fill those spots. And that would be good news for Tesla owners, especially if those are then NACS connectors.
Alright, last thing before we wrap it up today, just a quick look at the calendar since we didn't have a chance to do that yesterday, but we do have the Consumer Price Index, CPI, and Producer Price Index, PPI reports coming up later this week. Those will be before market open on Thursday and Friday respectively, so definitely something to keep an eye on for later this week.
Alright, that'll wrap it up for today, as always, thank you for listening, make sure you subscribe to ANSI and our notifications, also find me on X at Tesla podcast, and we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday, August 9th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.
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