Tesla's revenue in the second quarter reached a new high of nearly $25 billion, and under the "price reduction and volume exchange" strategy, the second quarter | factory | strategy
On July 20th, Tesla released its Q2 2023 financial report, breaking records for production, delivery, and revenue in a single quarter, while continuously expanding its product line, resulting in a 41% year-on-year increase in research and development expenses.
According to the financial report, Tesla's revenue in the second quarter was approximately $24.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 47%, setting a record for the highest quarterly revenue, with a net profit of approximately $2.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 20%.
The significant increase in revenue is due to the unexpected production and sales situation. In the second quarter, Tesla produced 479700 electric vehicles globally, a year-on-year increase of 86%, and delivered 466100 electric vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 83%. Tesla's price reduction strategy is showing effectiveness. This financial report reiterated Tesla's production capacity target for 2023 to be 1.8 million vehicles, and Tesla has delivered a total of 888000 electric vehicles in the first half of the year. To achieve the delivery target, the delivery volume in the second half of the year in a single quarter needs to reach more than 455000 vehicles.
Tesla stated that the new production record set in the second quarter is attributed to the continuously increasing production capacity of new factories and the strong performance of Shanghai's super factories and Fremont factories. The Shanghai Gigafactory remains Tesla's main export center, and currently Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory can produce a car in less than 40 seconds, with a localization rate of over 95% for its components.
But it should also be noted that on the other hand, Tesla's gross profit margin is still decreasing in exchange for volume. In the second quarter, under the GAAP standard, Tesla's overall gross profit margin was 18.2%, a year-on-year decrease of 682 basis points and a decrease of 110 basis points from the first quarter.
Currently, Tesla is still launching various promotional activities to stimulate the consumer market. For example, Tesla recently announced that starting from July 7th, if a buyer repurchases or orders a Model 3/Y through friend referrals and picks up the car, they will receive a referral reward of 3500 yuan to offset the final payment of the vehicle. Previously, for the Model S/X model, Tesla also launched the largest current car incentive and referral gift package to date.
Additionally, it is worth noting that Tesla's research and development expenses are rapidly increasing. In the second quarter, Tesla's research and development expenses amounted to 943 million US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 41%, equivalent to the sum of research and development expenses of several new automotive forces.
This is largely due to Tesla's increasing investment in more product lines. In the second quarter, Cybertruck is currently producing candidate versions of vehicles and will begin the first batch of deliveries as planned this year; The production capacity of 4680 batteries has also made significant progress, and the production of cathode materials and lithium refining capacity are also synchronously improving; At present, the total mileage of the FSD test version has reached the industry leading 300 million miles, and it will achieve exponential growth with the expansion of the test user base; The Dojo supercomputer will begin production this month and will gradually help Tesla achieve fully autonomous driving; In addition, Tesla's installed energy storage capacity increased by 222% year-on-year in the second quarter, reaching 3.7 gigawatt hours.
These new projects are generally expensive. For example, Musk revealed during a earnings conference call that Tesla will spend approximately $1 billion over the next year on the Dojo project, primarily to acquire a large amount of video data for training Dojo.
The market is also closely monitoring when these new product lines can be converted into revenue. During the financial report conference call, Musk reiterated his willingness to authorize software and hardware for technologies such as autonomous driving and fully autonomous driving to companies in need, and mentioned that he is in preliminary discussions with a large vehicle manufacturer regarding this.
