Tesla (TSLA) will report its Q1 earnings after the market close Wednesday, and investors are zeroing in on the impact of pandemic-related factory shutdowns in Shanghai and the supply chain crisis on the electric vehicle giant’s production during the quarter.
Then there’s the question of whether CEO Elon Musk’s new pet project, a potential hostile takeover of Twitter (TWTR), will distract from his focus on continuing to ramp up Tesla’s vehicle output. The company previously said it would average 50% annual vehicle delivery growth, and any deviation from that could wallop Tesla’s stock price.
Here are the numbers investors are expecting for the quarter, based on Bloomberg’s consensus data, compared with how Tesla fared in Q1 last year.
Tesla, like many of the world’s automakers, continues to grapple with pandemic-induced supply chain problems and a global chip shortage. Tesla was forced to shutter its Shanghai plant for three weeks amid a city-wide lockdown geared toward stopping COVID infections.
The company has since reopened its factory as a closed-loop system, meaning employees are sleeping on mattresses on the building’s floor.
“We estimate that roughly 50k units are now reduced for the June quarter for starters given the last three weeks of shutdown and depending on how aggressively Tesla can ramp back production could be impacted further over the next month,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note ahead of Tesla’s earnings.
The automaker, however, also opened two new plants in the quarter, one in Berlin, which will supply Europe with new vehicles, and one in Texas, which is already pumping out EVs.
All of this comes amid the backdrop of Musk’s attempted hostile takeover of Twitter. He’s expected to make a tender offer to the social network’s shareholders in the coming days.
That could prove to be a distraction for the CEO, who also heads up SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.
Musk is expected to join Tesla’s earnings call after the bell, and investors will surely be anxious to hear whether he’s more interested in Tesla or Twitter at the moment.
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