My perspective is that these issues will continue.
1. Tesla closed a severe number of their stores. All sales-staff thought they were going to be fired, but then Elon Musk reversed his decision. In effect: Tesla's sale staff has low morale due to boneheaded moves by Tesla leadership.
2. Tesla's future sales strategy is still a big question. Will Tesla push "online only"? If so, all of these salespeople should be looking for a new job, before the next round of layoffs. Tesla has done nothing to satisfy its sales staff. Rumor is that the commissions program was also severely cut during the whole process.
3. Tesla has had dramatic price cuts throughout Q1. We all knew they needed to do this as they lost the Tax Credit, but I think most people hoped that the price cuts would have worked. $2000 off of all vehicles in January, the "release" of the $35k Model 3 (except none have been delivered yet), etc. etc.
4. Tesla changed their sales policies to be far more forgiving to customers in Q1. Customers can return a vehicle as long as its under 1000 miles and before a week is up (allegedly anyway. I dunno how the process works). In any case, the price drops + very forgiving sales policies are trying to court more buyers. But... all of this resulted in 30% fewer sales in the Quarter (compared to last quarter). So Tesla was unable to counteract the drop in demand.
5. The $3750 US Tax Credit runs out in June, and is halved again to only $1375. Other cars, like Honda Clarity, still have the full $7500 tax credit, and are available at $33,000 (under the $35k Model 3, which isn't even being delivered yet). The competition is picking up, and the competition still has all of the tax credits available.
I decided I'd rather lose money due to my own decisions and loaded up on AAPL instead which ended up being recouping my losses and then some. I basically limit myself to major tech co's since that's where I see the consolidation of wealth ending up which has proven to be a smart bet so far. As long as I have good convictions about a company I'm happy to invest directly, maybe in retirement when I stop caring enough to follow companies closely I may consider a managed fund with a proven track record to diversify the risk.
That's different from an index fund.
I would be focusing on bonds indexes right now though, that's just me. Good luck with the lifetime win/loss if you keep this up.
I also bought a model 3. Which actually does help them a little. They need sales more than they need people to buy shares on the secondary market. That's not why I bought it though. I bought it because it was the first BEV with a useful range I could afford.
You can see this as “they are good at overcoming problems” or as “there’s always something going wrong.” I tend to see it more as the former but seeing it as the latter may be a sensible explanation for the stock movements.
Which is literally the truth in any business, in any industry: there is always a major problem, and a plethora of smaller ones to boot. Whether it's the competitors gaining up, the market undergoing a fundamental shift, the economy slowing down or the costs of materials and labor going up, there's always flux. Just as well there is always some waste that could and should be improved upon.
The key difference is that some companies burn through (squander?) capital and resources to paper over the problems - to signal "good health" - while other companies cut close to the wire and allocate the capital and resources to where they will the most effective, dealing with problems when and where they become pressing.
Firstly, many of Tesla's problems are self-inflicted. How much time and capital was wasted on the alien dreadnought? How much damage has been caused by the constant turnover in management, or the whipsaw changes in price structure and product offerings, or the likely ill-fated decision to double down on computer vision rather than use LIDAR? One mistake we can quantify is the disastrous $2.6 billion related-party acquisition of SolarCity.
And even problems which are not necessarily self-inflicted wounds, like their cashflow problems or quality issues which possibly any upstart time-constrained car manufacturer might face, are not any less problematic for that fact. As an investor it doesn't matter whether quality issues would happen to another electric car startup; they're happening to Tesla. Their competition actually does know how to build cars to spec, and they're coming out with their own electric models. And their stock comes free of childish bickering with the SEC or critically risky solvency status or desperate and deceptive PR stunts like solar roofs or underground tunnels.
Fair enough. There's always the alternative angle of, “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. “No”, I replied. “I just spent $600,000 training him – why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” [0]
>Their competition actually does know how to build cars to spec
That's the problem: the competitors are trying to "build a car, except with electric drivetrain". This gave us Nissan Leafs and BMW i3s. There's nothing "sexy" (appealing) about those cars. Contrast them with the 2008 Tesla Roadster, and every subsequent model: due to the awe factor, people queue to buy them, in spite of the glaring manufacturing deficiencies. You essentially contrasted potential vis-a-vis actual queues of people with bundles of cash in hand. When was the last time you saw a month-long queue at your local dealership?
Those manufacturers desperately need to un-learn how to build cars, to be able to build their own take on Tesla. Also, at the same time, how to ditch the dealership model[1] that's enshrined both via tight web of interdependences and also via law in multiple states.
>deceptive PR stunts
From cheated emission tests through crashworthiness rating that's always 4 or 5 stars, to "all new and improved" which is still 8+ seconds of 0 to 60, to meaningless MPG ratings, to the lacking security of the netowked cars, and to the over-hyped, non-delivered self-driving, and to the pervasive need to negotiate down car payments presented on misleading sheets, the car industry is built on deceptive PR stunts.
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[0] https://www.peoplehr.com/blog/2015/06/26/what-would-you-do-i...
[1] won't be profitable as-is due to much less oil changes, brake pad jobs and all that.
The problem with Tesla is that they're trying to build an electric drivetrain and then tack on that pesky "rest of the car" on top of it as an afterthought. Everyone knows that Tesla has the best electric drivetrain out there, but they're still struggling to build cars in quantity to within quality standards and service them at scale.
With respect to PR stunts, of course Big Auto is corrupt and deceptive and generally awful. But they're not the ones riding high on a tsunami of feel-good save-the-planet PR. If Tesla wants their good boy points, they need to behave and earn them.
As a car company/hardware company, I'd also argue Tesla is simply in a much tighter, harder to succeed-in industry than the other tech companies, who get ridiculous revenue for doing unethical practices with user data for basically zero marginal cost.
Finally, keep in mind that Tesla is BEV, and there are many, many well-paid opponents of BEV in the USA and elsewhere. Tesla is purposefully disrupting the bottom lines of oil and ICE companies, that is not going to be met with fair coverage in all press outlets.
The mistake in your analysis is believing this is a delivery issue, not one of demand.
>Lately, I have seen specifically with Tesla that short-term concerns have been dragging down the stock way too much.
Wait, what? This company was at one time bigger than Ford and GM based entirely on future expectations. Yet you think the share price is driven by short-term concerns???