But then, I cannot understand how Whats App could be valued 19 billion...
I suppose that is slightly unfair since I happen to think Tesla is fairly well valued, maybe slightly undervalued currently, and obviously investors are the ones supporting that price. It seems like it is mostly a few institutional investors and the general public propping them up right now though, not the sell side firms that can dominate coverage and mentality sometimes.
Tesla, on the other hand, can't do that. They manufacture a tangible product and have a lot of established competition to which they can be easily compared.
Currently Tesla's market cap is 150% that of Renault's. A company that sells millions of vehicles, has factories all around the world and makes a very healthy profit for its shareholders.
So, Tesla, instead of trading at a discount to reflect the risk involved, is traded as if it's already a successful company 1.5 times the size of Renault. So, if you think Tesla is valued "fairly" now, please, tell me what should be its market cap when it actually starts making profit? $300B? $3T?
Renault's size isn't expected to change significantly over the next decade. Tesla's is. This means that if you own Tesla shares now, 10 years later they are going to be worth a massive amount because Tesla will be much bigger than Renault, so the price naturally rises to that expectation, only abetted by the possibility that Tesla collapses.
It isn't about where the company is at the moment. It is about where you think the company will be in "the future" (at whatever point that is relevant to you) reduced by the probability that you think they will fail (and most people think that chance is tiny). So when Tesla starts making a profit, its market cap probably won't have grown that much, because it was expected behavior priced into today's valuation.
That sentence doesn't make sense. I think you're conflating worth/value (subjective measures) with price (objective). I can't pay more for an item than what's it worth to me
You're comparing the valuation of horse and buggy companies in the 1910s to Ford.
You mean there are no other companies selling electric vehicles? And clearly, if, say, Mercedes, doesn't have electric model now, it's absolutely impossible that they have one in 5 years, just like a horse & buggy company, right? But forget about Mercedes, how about Nissan Leaf, which exists now and is the world's best selling electric car? Shouldn't Nissan be valued at similarly crazy valuations? Or they won't be part of this new brave world and don't get to eat from the "new slice of pie"?
Tesla has just changed the world, whether you realize it or not, and tables have turned against the petrol industry. The other brands have long bet the electric cars were impossible, they belong in history books together with our other guilty actions like inquisition, native americans and slavery.
Anyway, there's the obvious notion that capturing pollution from one central energy source (a coal or gas plant) is far more likely to reduce pollution than trying to reduce pollution from every car.
But you -did- say that Tesla is working this "completely new slice of the pie". Which they're not. Unless you artificially constrain it to a segment where only Tesla exists. Whilst the current Tesla models might well be "luxury electric", the upcoming stuff is entirely in the same segment as Nissan, hence the reply to you.
Tesla is not just a car company. They are going to be the largest li-ion battery manufacturer, distributed energy provider(with the solarcity acquisition), energy storage provider, supply grid stabilization services(important when more of the generation is not base-load), and compete in the autonomous car sector.
Its fine with me if people don't think those other areas are going to be profitable for Tesla, but thinking of them as just a car manufacturer is kind of missing the point. And those other areas I mentioned do make up a largely untapped pie that Tesla is poised to tap into.
Energy storage provider is "battery at a bigger scale", similar with supply grid stabilization. And as far as I am aware the PowerWall has been a commercial failure, even among Tesla owners. I'm not sure how that will magically do a 180 now that Musk is going from "influential adviser" to "owner".
There is the other side of Tesla Energy, which is the Powerpack. The Powerpack is the commercial/utility-scale product, available in quantities suitable for grid-level storage. They had over $1b worth of orders[1] for the Powerpack as of late last year, far more than they are capable of manufacturing currently. The Gigafactory opened slightly early to start producing those packs using Samsung cells, but eventually those will move to Panasonic cells as well. There is huge untapped demand just in batteries here that is only starting to surface and be fulfilled.
Grid supply stabilization has more to do with smart grids/smart inverters applied to solar panel + battery installs. SolarCity has detailed it in some of their more recent town halls[2].
1. http://fortune.com/2015/08/10/tesla-grid-battery/ 2. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/87401050
Over a billion monthly users... Not exactly small potatoes.
Wierd. Someone should do a study...
I guess a more accurate thing to say would be that the group you are talking about is obsessed with scheduled reports.
In Tesla's case, so much of their value is discounted into the future, and if the company was purely valued on quarterly results, would not be worth very much at all. Obviously a lot of the investing world disagrees with that and chooses to value Tesla a bit more highly based on the investment they are undertaking and demand they have demonstrated. Their stock is modestly up today after these results and news of the solarcity merger(also reported as disastrous in the media). Their quarterly results would generally be accepted by most methods of valuing companies as disastrous, and is being reported like so by most of the financial media. Maybe the shorts will win out eventually, but lots of people seem to be willing to finance Tesla despite their constant fundraising, unprofitably, and missed expectations. I wonder if the reasons might not be reflected in their 10-qs?
They had about 2,500 more cars in transit at the end of Q2 than at the end of Q1. They were producing about 1,000 more cars per week at the end of Q2 than at the end of Q1. If it takes their cars an average of 2.5 weeks to be delivered from the factory (which is a reasonable number) then everything lines up. I don't see any need for a grain of salt or thinking it's mysterious.