In a departure from its usual practice, Tesla first quarter sales figures have been released by the company. Previously, chairman Elon Musk refused to disclose any information about company sales other than the minimum required by Securities Exchange Commission filings, claiming that making monthly sales reports like every other car company in the world just gives the media an excuse “to read all sorts of nonsense into the deliveries.”
But in a press release on April 3, Musk said the company would now provide quarterly sales figures within 3 days of the end of each quarter. And what those figures show is that Tesla delivered 10.030 vehicles in the first quarter of 2015 — a 55% increase over 2014. He says he decided to change the way the company released sales information because “inaccurate sources of information are sometimes used by others to project the number of vehicle deliveries.” In other words, a cottage industry has sprung up among bloggers and talking heads — mostly stock analysts — who are trying, and failing, to make intelligent guesses about what is happening inside the company based on very limited data.
The press release cautions, “There may be small changes to this delivery count (usually well under 1%), as Tesla only counts a delivery if it is transferred to the end customer and all paperwork is correct. Also, this is only one measure of our financial performance and should not be relied on as an indicator of our quarterly financial results, which depend on a variety of factors, including the cost of sales, foreign exchange movements and mix of directly leased vehicles.”
Lots of people — most of them investors — are extremely interested in what Tesla is up to so they can decide whether to buy or sell Tesla stock. Some of the reports in the press over the past two yearshave bordered on the hysterical. Hopefully, Tesla’s new sales reporting policy will help to quench the public’s thirst for information. Which, after all, is the reason your are reading this, right?
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