Image: © Aleksei Potov/Stock.adobe.com
Following a disappointing 2022 for Tesla’s stock price, Elon Musk slashed its vehicle costs and said the company could reach 2m in EV sales this year.
Tesla’s first quarter for the year has seen it reach a new record in car sales, attributed to recent price cuts invoked by the EV maker.
The company delivered nearly 423,000 vehicles for the first quarter of 2023, a 4pc rise from the previous quarter and a 36pc boost from the same period in 2022.
This marks a new record for Tesla, but once again fell short of analyst expectations of around 430,000 vehicle deliveries, Reuters reports.
Tesla suffered a dramatic drop in its stock price last year due to changing economic headwinds and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
The company’s final quarter of 2022 failed to meet analysts’ expectations of car sales, while its overall growth target for the year fell short of its own predictions, reaching 40pc instead of 50pc.
Following these results, Tesla began cutting its prices globally to try boost its sales figures. But analysts expected a higher result in sales figures. Musk said in January that its EV sales could reach up to 2m for 2023, which would be a 52pc increase from last year.
The electric vehicle maker has faced growing competition, as legacy automakers such as Ford and General Motors have pushed into the growing market.
Tesla lost its top spot as world’s leading manufacturer of battery-powered electric vehicles last July, getting beaten in production by Chinese rival BYD.
In July, Tesla announced it had sold 75pc of its bitcoin holdings, which added $936m in cash to its balance sheet. At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk cited concerns over the overall liquidity of Tesla in light of Covid-19 shutdowns in China as the main incentive to sell.
A Wall Street analyst warned last December that actions such as suspending a host of journalists from Twitter damaged Tesla’s market sentiment. Musk had used Tesla shares to back his $44bn takeover of the social media company.
Last December, Musk said he will resign as the CEO of Twitter once he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job”. This was in response to an online poll, where a slight majority of users voted for him to resign.
This followed his statement to a Delaware judge last November when he said that he planned to find somebody else to run Twitter “over time”.
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