Category Archives: Autos

Elon Musk’s master plan for Tesla (TSLA)

July 25, 2016 By in Tesla, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Last week, Elon Musk issued his second master plan for TSLA as a blog post on the company website.

The plan has four parts:

—autonomous driving, with the goal of making self-driving cars 10x as safe as those operated by human drivers.  The main issue here is, according to Musk, compiling enough safety date to convince governments to allow autonomous driving on public roads

—expanding the product line, to include pickup trucks and compact SUVs, plus heavy trucks and urban buses.

Although what he writes on this topic is not 100% clear, one goal under this heading seems to be to reinvent the auto manufacturing process in a way that the new/improved factory is 5x – 10x as efficient as current ones.  One ambiguity I see is whether this means 10x the efficiency of, say, a Toyota plant, or 10x the efficiency of the current TSLA operation.  I presume he means the former.

Another is exactly what “efficiency” is.  I’m taking it to mean that Musk intends to create factories that, for the same capital investment, will produce 5x – 10x as many cars in a given time as current factories do.  My cursory inspection of auto 10Ks (other than TSLA, I don’t think I’ve owned an auto stock since the 1980s) tells me this won’t mean a huge jump in unit profits for any auto firm, including TSLA, since most of the costs of making a car are in materials and labor, not capital equipment.  Greater efficiency would boost overall profits, however, as well as allow TSLA to dramatically increase its vehicle output.

—sharing.  Musk thinks that in an era of autonomous driving, some people won’t own cars themselves anymore.  They’ll simply call for one from a sharing service when they need it.  Other people will own cars but will allow their vehicles to be used in a sharing service when they don’t need them.  TSLA intends to organize sharing services for its vehicles.

This is a much more revolutionary statement than it seems.

The average car is used only 10% – 15% of the day, according to Musk.  If sharing boosted that usage figure to, say, 30% in highly populated areas, then those regions would need only half the cars they do today   …maybe fewer.  At some point, this would mean an implosion in demand for new autos–and the end of the car manufacturing industry as we know it.

—merger of TSLA and SolarCity (SCTY).  In his Master Plan, part deux, Musk says he wants to create a “smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.”

He says this can’t happen while TSLA and SCTY are separate companies, something he describes as “an accident of history.”

I’m not sure I buy this.  I do think that Musk created clear economic superiority of TSLA over SCTY when he decided to place the Gigafactory for solar batteries inside TSLA.  To my mind, that makes SCTY radically dependent on TSLA today.  Merging the two companies would put SCTY back on an even footing.  For TSLA shareholders, arguably the main benefit of the combination is obtaining SCTY at a cheap price.

Tesla (TSLA) is bidding for SolarCity (SCTY)

June 22, 2016 By in Autos, mergers and acquisitions, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The offer is an all-stock deal, with TSLA willing to exchange 0.122 – 0.131 of its shares for each outstanding share of SCTY.  The exact figure will depend on a closer examination of SCTY’s books.  The proposal was announced after yesterday’s close.

My thoughts:

–in today’s pre-market trading, SCTY shares are up by about 14% and TSLA’s stock is down by around 12%.  This has little to do with the merits of the deal.  It’s all about arbitrage.  To the degree the market regards the acquisition as a done deal, it ceases to look at SCTY as an independent entity.  SCTY becomes instead equivalent to a deferred issue of TSLA stock.  Because the bid is at a premium to the pre-offer price of SCTY, SCTY is a relatively cheap way to own TSLA.  So arbitrageurs sell short the “expensive” form of Tesla, i.e. TSLA, and use the money they receive to buy the “cheap” form of Tesla, i.e., SCTY.  So SCTY goes up and TSLA goes down.

–my guess is that there’s no other bidder.  Elon Musk, who owns 20%- of TSLA also owns 20%+ of SCTY.  As is often the case with family-owned empires, one firm ( TSLA) is the heart of the enterprise.  Other companies are arrayed as satellites around the central hub.  Those tend to be more highly specialized, sometimes riskier–and invariably dependent on the main core for essential goods/services.  In this case, the Gigafactory being built by TSLA is going to the be the source of the batteries that SCTY will be distributing to customers.  Who else needs one of these?

–price is the main motive, I think.  SCTY is less than a tenth of the market cap of TSLA, so acquisition won’t make a radical difference in the latter’s fundamentals.  In most cases I’ve seen, the hub-satellite relation persists for decades, with third-party shareholders content with their stepchild status as an adequate tradeoff for the satellite’s narrower focus and faster earnings growth in specific circumstances.

–arguably, this is a good chance for adventurous to buy TSLA shares toward the lower end of its recent trading range.  I’m going to sit on my hands for a while, though, to try to gauge how severe selling pressure on TSLA may turn out to be.

 

what I find most surprising about Tesla (TSLA)

April 8, 2016 By in Autos, Technical Analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

a concept stock

My California son got me interested in TSLA a couple of years ago.

It’s a “concept” stock.  That is, the stock trades on the dream or vision of future revenue and profit.

…like Amazon

In many ways, it’s like Amazon (AMZN) was in the late 1990s.

That company seemed to me to be on the verge of financial disaster for most of the first decade of its existence.  It only began to be profitable after it expanded from its original virtual bookstore idea to becoming an online department store.  In my view, had AMZN not aggressively raised a lot of capital during the Internet Bubble, it would not have survived.  After all, it lost money eight (?) years in a row before breaking into the black.

the center of an empire

TSLA is the seat of the Elon Musk empire.  Some say it’s a car company (me included); some would characterize it ultimately as a battery company, with cars as the wrapper that contains the principal TSLA product.

the stock

The stock is now trading at $260 or so a share, giving TSLA a market capitalization of about $39 billion.  Suppose we think, to make up a number, that the stock should trade at 30x earnings.  If so, the current price expresses investor belief that at some point the company will be making $1.3 billion a year and still have, say, 20% growth in annual profit in prospect.

back of the envelope numbers

Let’s say TSLA is a car company and that it will be making on average $7,000 a car, after tax, on its output at some future date.  If so, the current market price already factors into it that TSLA will be selling about 200,000 cars a year–and expanding rapidly.

I think that’s possible.  More important, the market says that’s what investors are willing to believe, and pay for.

risks

There are risks, yes, the most obvious of which is that the company keeps pushing back the date when it will turn cash flow positive.  What cash flow positive means is that the company will be able to generate enough cash from operations to cover costs, and will no longer be eating into its cash reserves to make ends meet.

what I find surprising

What’s stunning, though, is that less than two months ago the stock was trading at just over $141, or just over half today’s price.

New information has come out since then:

–TSLA began taking deposits for its $35,000 base price Model 3.  In less than a week, it has collected $1,000 each for about 300,000 units, with enough add-ons to bring the average selling price to $42,000. Most won’t receive their cars until 2018.  This support seems to me to show there’s potentially huge demand for electric cars, even at today’s lower oil price.

–the company announced that it missed its 1Q16 sales target because of parts shortages.  Presumably this means it did not turn cash flow positive as anticipated during the quarter.  That’s bad, especially since we’ve heard this song before.

the stock price

The stock is up $10-$20 a share on the two items, which were announced at roughly the same time.

What I find interesting is that a relatively large market cap company can move from $140 to $240 in a matter of weeks on a change in sentiment.  That’s about 70%!

So much for efficient markets and investor rationality   …not that anyone outside the ivory tower believes in this stuff.  But this is a huge move.

algorithmic trading?

I think it’s evidence of relatively naive algorithmic trading at work (based ultimately on two other wacky academic ideas–that the most important thing in investing is to control costs, and that there’s no craft skill/specialized knowledge involved in investing).

I also see it as support for my view that trading can be unusually profitable in this environment.   We should look for other instances where this may be happening.

 

 

 

3Q15 for Tesla (TSLA); do an extra 4,000 cars make a difference?

November 5, 2015 By in Autos, earnings conference calls, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Yesterday, TSLA shares were up by 11% after reporting an in-line quarter the night before.  This was in a market that was down slightly.

The reason?

The company modified its full-year guidance for production from 50,000 – 55,000 units to 50,000 – 52,000 units.  With 4Q15 almost half over, investors took this new guidance as relatively reliable.  But the key factor is that the guidance, while down, was not the 45,000 – 50,000 that Wall Street had been fearing.

Wild gyrations are a fact of life for highly speculative stocks like TSLA (I own a small position).  That’s not the interesting part.  After all, what sustains the sky-high valuation of the stock is not the current results is the dream that one day the company will be selling millions of units and earning billions.

What is an important investment lesson is the reason that a production difference of around 5,000 cars in a quarter, which sounds like a small amount, should make such a difference to investors.

It’s all about cash burn, or the question of how long a company that ‘s using more cash than it’s taking in can sustain itself without turning cash flow positive.  This also happens to be one of the few things in a “dream” stock that’s important and that we can know for sure.

 

In the TSLA case, the firm realized–at the start of 2015, in my view–that the multi-billion dollar bond offering it made in 2014 wouldn’t be enough to sustain it until it began to generate more cash than it used.  Contact with investment bankers resulted in a spate of glowing reports being issued by brokerage house analysts–and then a $750 million stock offering.  What investors has been panicking about a few weeks ago (and may begin to worry about again;  who knows?) is that this extra three-quarters of a billion dollars might not be enough.

If we figure that a fully loaded Tesla retails for $100,000 ( figure I just plucked out of the air), a shortfall of 4,000 cars translates into a cash shortfall of $400 million.  So, “Poof!,” half the cash cushion created by the recent equity offering is gone.  (I’m assuming that everything else for TSLA remains the same, which is probably too pessimistic.  But the exact dollar amount isn’t the point.)

Arguably, TSLA could simply issue more stock or bonds to raise extra cash.  However, if TSLA were actually seen to be needing a loan, the terms it could expect to get would probably not be as favorable as before.  Another offering so soon after the last equity raising would also risk shattering the investor “dream” of the inevitability of TSLA’s success.

TSLA now expects to turn cash flow positive during 1Q16.  This does not imply that it will be cash flow positive for the entire quarter, or for the quarter as a whole.  Instead, it means that it will begin taking in more money than it spends by March 31st at the latest.  We’ll know more when Tesla reports 4Q15.

capital raising by Tesla (TSLA)

August 17, 2015 By in Autos, battery power, bond market, securities markets, Stock ideas, stock market, Technology Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

the offering

Last Friday, TSLA filed a final prospectus with the SEC, indicating that it is selling up to 3.099 million new shares of common stock (including underwriters’ over-allotment) at $242 a share.   This will net the company close to three-quarters of a billion dollars, which it needs to fund ambitious expansion plans–the Gigafactory to make batteries the chief among them.

I presume the precipitous decline of TSLA shares over the past ten days or so was triggered by underwriters soliciting indications of interest in this offering from hedge funds and other institutional investors.  Two bullish signs:  the offering was initially pitched as being 2.1 million shares, but raised to 2.7 million on Friday (not counting the underwriters’ allotment, which will have been bumped up as well).  As I’m writing this prior to Monday’s open, TSLA shares are trading at around $255 each.

my thoughts, (somewhat) randomly presented

  1.  TSLA made what I consider a firm-transforming offering of $3 billion in convertible bonds (at a conversion price of $350 (!!!) a share) last year.  This says something about how professional fixed income investors feel about the attractiveness of straight bonds.  More important for TSLA, the successful offering took talk of building the Gigafactory out of the realm of fantasy and placed it solidly into reality.
  2. The automobile world has changed significantly over the past year, with the plunge in oil prices and the rise of ride-sharing services like Uber.  The former may mess up the economics of electic vehicles; the latter calls into question the highly operationally leveraged corporate structure of traditional car companies (translation into English:  if they need to run at, say, 80% of plant capacity to break even, will that be possible if Millennials en masse use Uber instead of buying a car themselves.  Will the car industry be a replay of the current commodities debacle).
  3. My guess is that these shifts: (i) increase TSLA’s attractiveness to stock market investors vs. conventional car companies, and (ii) make Teslas relatively more attractive abroad, where petroleum products are more expensive than in the US.
  4. It seemed clear to me from the outset that the 2014 bond offering didn’t totally solve TSLA’s need for capital.  Another offering had to happen in 2015.  I’d expected more bonds.  Why stock instead?  Market etiquette says that a new offering should be at a higher price–here meaning a higher conversion price–than previous ones (otherwise last year’s buyers look like idiots).  Also, potential lenders periodically want companies to prove that they still have enthusiastic equity backers.  This is a combination of lenders not wanting financial leverage to be too high, their not wanting to be the only ones holding the bag if things go sour, and their knowledge that bonds are going to be under pressure as interest rates begin to rise.
  5. Last year’s offering signaled a near-term top for TSLA shares.   My instinct is to think that this offering establishes a near-term bottom.  I own a small position in the stock, however, so I may have an interest in thinking this is the case.