Tesla’s stock is on a tear this year, up about 50 percent year to date after the company had its best Q1 yet. With analysts looking ahead to the next nine months of the year, Tesla's shareholders have pushed the company's market capitalization up significantly in recent months.
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Above: The word "Tesla" on a Supercharger (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).
So far in 2023, Tesla’s stock has added around $200 billion to its market capitalization, and the company recently achieved its largest quarterly percentage gain since Q4 2020. At the time of writing, Tesla has a market capitalization of $585.55 billion, up significantly from the $389 billion it had ending 2022.
The news has been welcomed by Tesla shareholders, especially after 2022 saw the automaker dropping almost two-thirds of its value, marking the second full-year stock drop since going public. Despite this, Tesla’s electric vehicle deliveries for the first three months of the year were strong, as supported by lineup-wide price reductions and updated eligibility for the $7,500 and a handful of other factors.
Tesla delivered 422,875 vehicles in Q1 and produced 440,808, both made up primarily of the company's Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. The automaker had 421,371 deliveries of the Model 3 and Y, with just 19,437 deliveries of its premium Model S and X vehicles.
Prior to Tesla announcing its quarterly numbers, a MarketWatch story reported that RBC Capital Markets Analyst Tom Narayan expected Tesla to report strong deliveries in the first quarter of the year, even having boosted his delivery forecast to 445,000 units from 418,000. The FactSet consensus for Tesla’s Q1 deliveries was 432,000 deliveries at the time, with around 437,000 being predicted by analysts at the end of February.
“We increased our forecast based on strong sales data during the first two months of the quarter and believe sales accelerated in March,” wrote Narayan. “Production and sales data in China seem solid, and weekly domestic sales data in the first few weeks of March is robust which we assume continues.”
During Tesla’s Q4 earnings call held on January 24, CEO Elon Musk said that demand for Tesla’s EVs was way ahead of production, just as the company’s stock had had its best week in a decade. One Morgan Stanley went on to say that Tesla’s price cuts in January could ring in the “great deflation” of EVs, additionally indicating how far EV production has come.
Source: MarketWatch
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