Tesla and Panasonic make their partnership on the Gigafactory official as the automaker prepares to announce second-quarter earnings. Analysts will watch closely to see how well Tesla is tracking on its plan to deliver 35,000 cars this year as whether Elon Musk has any surprises up his sleeve.
Source: www.forbes.com
>"The wording of the press release suggests many details remain to be worked out, including how much Panasonic will be investing. Earlier reports, however, suggested a sum on the order of $200-300 million initially, which is expected to grow over time to perhaps $1 billion. In addition to building batteries at the new plant, Panasonic will continue to make them elsewhere and deliver them to the Gigafactory for assembly. The reason is that even the massive facility will only be able to produce about 70% of the cells needed for all the packs Tesla hopes to build — enough for 500,000 cars annually by 2020. […]
Deliveries, now and next quarter. Tesla has a stated goal of delivering 35,000 vehicles in 2014. It started off the year with 6,457 in the first quarter, which was slightly ahead of its target. Guidance for the current quarter was 7,500 deliveries, with significantly higher production of 8,500-9,000. The company has been trying to push production in order to get more cars into Europe and Asia, where the longer delivery pipeline isn’t quite full yet. If Tesla managed the 9,000 figure that would be nearly 20% higher than Q1 and would be an especially bullish sign.
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Gross margin progress continues? Tesla is already past last year’s gross margin goal of 25% and is targeting 28% for 2014. As with 2013, the company expects progress to occur in a step-wise fashion each quarter. […] "<
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