Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2023 earnings preview: What to expect today

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Tesla (TSLA) is about to release Q2 2023 financial results today, Wednesday, July 19, after the markets close. As usual, a conference call and Q&A with Tesla’s management are scheduled after the results.

Here we’ll take a look at what both the street and retail investors are expecting for the quarterly results.

Tesla Q2 2023 deliveries

As usual, Tesla already disclosed its Q2 vehicle delivery and production numbers, which drive the vast majority of the company’s revenue.

Earlier this month, Tesla confirmed that it delivered a new record of over 422,000 electric vehicles during the first quarter of the year.

Tesla also confirmed that it was able to produce a new record of nearly 480,000 vehicles during the quarter.

Delivery and production numbers are always slightly adjusted during earning results.

Tesla Q2 2023 revenue

For revenue, analysts generally have a pretty good idea of what to expect, thanks to the delivery numbers.

The Wall Street consensus for this quarter is $24.220 billion, and Estimize, the financial estimate crowdsourcing website, predicts a higher revenue of $24.836 billion.

This would represent a marginal increase over the previous quarter since even though Tesla achieved record deliveries, it had to slash prices to achieve it.

It would be a massive increase in revenue over the same period last year, but that wouldn’t be a great comparison since Tesla had to shut down Giga Shanghai during that time in 2022 temporarily.

Here are the predictions for Tesla’s revenue over the past two years, with Estimize predictions in blue, Wall Street consensus in gray, and actual results are in green:

Tesla Q2 2023 earnings

Tesla always attempts to be marginally profitable every quarter as it invests most of its money into growth, and it has been successful in doing so over the last two years now.

For Q2 2023, the Wall Street consensus is a gain of $0.80 per share, while Estimize’s prediction is higher with a profit of $0.87 per share.

Despite anticipating record revenue, Wall Street expects earnings to be down from last quarter because of the previously mentioned price cuts,

Here are the earnings per share over the last two years, where Estimize predictions are in blue, Wall Street consensus is in gray, and actual results are in green:

Other expectations for the TSLA shareholder’s letter and analyst call

Much of the shareholder focus is likely going to be around gross margin and operational profitability at the current price level, which has dropped significantly throughout the year.

With Tesla Energy achieving record quarters that are slowly starting to have a small impact on Tesla’s broader performance, it might be a point of interest again this quarter.

But looking at top-voted shareholders’ questions, it looks like the Tesla shareholder community is more interested in looking into the future.

Here are the top five questions that Tesla is likely going to answer during the conference call:

  • Has any automaker approached Tesla to license FSD?
  • When will you get more information about our Cybertruck orders? Estimated delivery schedules, pricing, and specifications?
  • Have you considered allowing FSD transferability as a lever to allow existing customers to upgrade to a new Tesla instead of being locked in to existing cars due to price of FSD?
  • What is the status of the 4680 Cell? How far are you from the specs you laid out on battery day? When do you expect to achieve what you laid out on Battery Day?
  • As you open the supercharger network in North America to other EVs, do you plan to accelerate anticipatory investments in supercharger expansion to avoid congestion, and how will you deal with long lead times to upgrade electric T&D services to these areas for multi-megawatt loads?

You can join us live on Electrek this evening for intensive coverage of Tesla’s Q2 2023 financial results starting at around 4 p.m. ET for the results and through the evening for news coming out of the conference call and results.