Key Takeaways:
- The report shows that the bitcoin Tesla bought at an average price of $33,000 is still with them.
- Wall Street’s forecast proves to be almost accurate as Tesla makes huge profits.
- Musk’s compensation plan brings a huge profit to the company.
On January 26, Tesla released its financial results and shareholder letter as announced earlier for the fourth quarter of 2021, and accordingly for its full-year 2021, after the market closed yesterday.
Tesla Q4 earnings results
The billion-dollar company has reported $17.7 billion in revenue and earnings of $2.54 per share (Non-GAAP). The results are almost similar to the Wall Street consensus. The revenue was predicted to be at $17.112 billion with earnings of $2.30 per share. The forecast represented both massive quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year increases in expectation as Tesla announced the recorded delivery of over 300,000 vehicles during that quarter.
Even after making crucial investments into future production, Tesla has made over $2 billion in profits during the fourth quarter for a total of over $5.5 billion in 2021. The company has released a statement saying: “Additionally, we generated $5.5B of GAAP net income and $5.0B of free cash flow in 2021 – after spending $6.58B to build out new factories and on other capital expenditures.”
Tesla has also made a remarkable gross margin of 30.6% on its vehicles this quarter. Though the margin drops to 29.2% if regulatory credits are excluded, the performance is still better than the whole industry.
The cash position of the company has also increased incredibly in quarter four. “Quarter-end cash and cash equivalents increased sequentially by $1.5B to $17.6B in Q4, driven mainly by the free cash flow of $2.8B, partially offset by net debt and finance lease repayments of $1.5B. Our total debt excluding vehicle and energy product financing has fallen to just $1.4B at the end of 2021.”
Tesla has also disclosed that they have incurred a tremendous $340M payroll tax cost over Elon Musk’s compensation plan in Q4. Again, this is a huge success for their benefit.
Earlier this month, the company also announced a purchase of $1.5 billion in bitcoin and shared its plans to accept digital currency as payments. On January 14, Musk tweeted that Tesla is ready to accept Dogecoin for payments for some merch.
