Carmakers’ annual meetings can be drab affairs: executive officers reading from a script, votes decided by big investors who do not bother turning up, and perhaps the occasional small shareholder deciding to take a pop at management.
Tesla Inc is different. This week’s event is to be livestreamed around the world, with investor hype over what the company is teasing as its “battery day” reaching Steve Jobs/iPhone levels of fever pitch.
Tesla has already achieved astonishing things, almost singlehandedly spurring the car industry toward its electric future while growing its own revenues from US$100 million in 2010 to US$24.6 billion last year.
INVESTORS’ HOPES
Now investors hope that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk will be revealing a technological leap relating to battery power tomorrow to put the company further ahead of its rivals.
The lead Tesla has is significant already. Analysts at Moody’s, the influential credit rating agency, judge that Tesla and China’s Beijing Automotive Group Co (北汽集團) will be ahead of other major carmakers in zero-emissions car production until at least 2023.
Patrick Hummel, an analyst at investment bank UBS Group AG, said he was expecting news of a battery containing so-called dry electrodes.
These would be manufactured with a simplified process that does not require energy-intensive drying before the electrodes are fitted in batteries.
The rewards for developing that technology are potentially enormous for an electric carmarker, removing some of the obstacles to breaking the stranglehold of fossil fuels.
Dry electrodes are expected to deliver advantages in energy density of as much as 50 percent, and they could be cheaper to make too.
They could also allow Musk to achieve his professed aim of eradicating ethically questionable cobalt from Tesla’s batteries.
Even if the automaker is not ready to transition to an entirely new type of battery, updates in the chemistry of its existing cells could also offer extra longevity, with high hopes that the coveted “million-mile battery” will be unveiled.
Perhaps most importantly, analysts are to be watching for signs of reductions in the cost of any electric car’s key component: The battery price premium remains a major disincentive in the way of increased consumers demand.
DURABLE HYPE
However, all of the considerable hype comes with a buyer beware warning attached.
For all that he has achieved, Musk has a track record of over-enthusiasm.
Chris McNally, a London-based analyst at Evercore ISI, an investment bank, said it would be wise to be wary of longer-term claims, pointing out that it has been four years since Musk’s first claims about his cars’ potential ability to fully self-drive.
Still, the hype has delivered quite astonishing returns for shareholders — whether that be otherwise steady Scottish investment managers such as Baillie Gifford or an army of retail investors, who have propelled the Tesla share price from below US$50 to US$500 at the beginning of this month.
It was back just above US$420 — a symbolic level for Musk — last week.
The market value of those shares, at more than US$400 billion, is worth more than the world’s four largest carmakers by volume combined — even though Tesla produced only 360,000 cars last year against 36 million from the traditional manufacturers.
At the moment, the gap between valuation and production reality is filled with Musk’s vision, but analysts are hoping for more detail on Tesla’s plan to move from disruptor to major automaker.
Key to that could be efforts at vertical integration — owning the supply chain, from the mine upwards, for battery materials such as nickel.
Whatever Musk reveals to his adoring fans, even normally reserved bankers are getting excited.
Hummel said he expected significant progress, “cementing Tesla’s cost and technology lead for several more years.”
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”