Electric automaker Tesla Motors Inc said on Tuesday production last year surged 64 percent year-on-year, but the company missed its delivery target in the final three months.
Tesla produced 24,882 vehicles in the final quarter of the year, resulting in total annual production of 83,922 vehicles.
Because of issues around the transition to new Autopilot auto-driving hardware, “production was weighted more heavily towards the end of the quarter than we had originally planned” and nearly 2,800 vehicles were not delivered, the company said in a statement.
As a result, the share price fell 1.83 percent to US$213.02 in after-hours trading.
However, the company said it hit its production goal and had 6,450 vehicles in transit to customers that would count toward its first-quarter deliveries.
“We were ultimately able to recover and hit our production goal, but the delay in production resulted in challenges that impacted quarterly deliveries, including, among other things, cars missing shipping cutoffs for Europe and Asia,” the company said.
Even if the vehicles were fully paid for, the company did not count them as deliveries in the fourth quarter unless the customer received the vehicle and completed all the paperwork.
Vehicle demand late in the year was particularly strong, with net orders for the Model S and Model X at an all-time record, 52 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2015.
Company founder Elon Musk said in October last year that he expected profitability in the fourth quarter.
Tesla, known for its high-end cars which sell for upward of US$70,000, is also working on a more affordable model at about half the price which is aimed at expanding the market for electric vehicles, as it seeks to boost the range between charges. It has already received 400,000 orders for the more economical model.
General Motors Co is hoping to challenge Tesla’s lower-priced model with its own Bolt electric vehicle.
Chevrolet promises the Bolt can travel more than 320km on a single charge, also comparable to the expected range of the Tesla Model 3.
Tesla is including its self-driving technology into all the electric cars it makes, running it in “shadow” mode to gather data on whether it is safer than having people in control.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by