"outrageous" is the first reaction of many people to see Tesla, Inc. 's Q1 financial report in 2022.

2022Q1 Tesla, Inc. 's revenue187.56 亿The dollar, up about 80% from $10.3 billion in the same period last year, exceeded analysts' forecasts178 亿元。

At the same time, Tesla, Inc. Q1 realized the net profit of returning to the mother.33 亿The dollar sharply exceeded analysts' expectations of $2.1 billion.

Three of the core numbers are ridiculously high:

• High gross profit margin. Tesla, Inc. Q1 gross profit margin reached 32.5 per cent, maintaining the data of more than 30 per cent for three consecutive quarters and setting a new record for global new energy car companies.
  

• High delivery volume. Tesla, Inc. Q1 delivery reached 310000 vehicles, which has risen steadily for four consecutive quarters, and the delivery volume is expected to grow by 50 per cent by the end of this year.
  

• High cash flow. Tesla, Inc. has a cash balance of US $17.5 billion at the end of the period and has rich cash reserves, which is equivalent to the market value of ten Dongfeng cars.

In addition, Tesla, Inc. also released several information points:

CybertruckMass production is expected next year, while Tesla, Inc. will start the Robotaxi business to compete with Cruise, Waymo and Baidu, Inc. Robotaxi. Tesla, Inc. expects to achieve mass production of Robotaxi by 2024 without steering wheels and pedals.

One obvious trend is that Tesla, Inc. is becoming more and more profitable, distancing himself from other new energy car companies.

In 2022, the best seller of Tesla, Inc. in China was that the sales volume of Model YMagi exceeded in January to March.10 万Taiwan, based on a rough calculation of the price of a Model 3 at 300000, Tesla, Inc. can earn 100000 yuan, but if Tesla, Inc. is replaced with the gross profit margin of German high-end brands Mercedes-Benz and Audi, the profits of car companies will plummet, with Mercedes-Benz earning only 36000 and Audi earning only 30,000. (2021 gross profit margin of Mercedes-Benz 12.7%, Audi 10.7%)

Is the "overall exceeding expectation" of Tesla, Inc. Q1 financial report data enough to prove that new energy vehicles have ushered in the "best times"?

Automobile Business, strengthening Tesla, Inc. 's position of King

Tesla, Inc. 's upward revenue structure is mainly due to the growing "car selling business".

If you open Tesla, Inc. 's income structure of 18.7 billion US dollars, you will find that at present, the automobile sales business is still the pillar of Tesla, Inc., accounting for the company's business income.86.5While car rental income, energy storage income, services and other income account for less than 15%.

Selling cars is still the core of Tesla, Inc..

Car owners who are familiar with Tesla, Inc. know that Tesla, Inc. often vacillates between price increases and price cuts, and it is common for cars bought by front feet to be reduced by 20% two months later, so Tesla, Inc. has been jokingly referred to as "financial products" by domestic car owners.

Even at the beginning of this year, Tesla, Inc. experienced a "price increase storm", and even scalpers were involved in the "secondary market" of Tesla, Inc. 's order trading.

Obviously, the "high-risk" attribute of Tesla, Inc. car has not affected Tesla, Inc. 's sales. Since Q1 in 2021, Tesla, Inc. 's car sales have achieved four consecutive increases, and the prospect is very good.

The front-end orders soared, and the back-end Tesla, Inc. 's factory was not idle. They all made every effort to build a factory and improve production efficiency.

Tesla, Inc. Q1 has delivered31 万The number of cars, up 68% from the same period last year, continued to refresh the delivery volume, and Musk himself told analysts at the Q1 telephone performance conference that the delivery volume is expected to achieve a growth rate of 50% by the end of this year. According to this growth trend, analysts expect Tesla, Inc. 's delivery volume for the whole of 2022 to exceed150 万辆。

What is the concept of 1.5 million cars? It is probably five times more than the annual delivery volume of the three new domestic car-building forces, Wei Xiaoli, which adds up to 2021.

Thus it can be seen that if the new car-building forces headed by Wei Xiaoli do not seize time to narrow the gap, consumers' understanding of electric cars in the future is likely to be only Tesla, Inc. and "other".

Tesla, Inc. 's delivery volume is growing so fast, thanks to "building high walls and accumulating a wide range of grain."

Put this sentence in Tesla, Inc. 's action, that is, constantly innovate manufacturing technology to improve car-building efficiency, and become willing to build a factory. "Capital construction madman"to complete the localization transformation of Tesla, Inc..

First of all, let's take a look at the first point. In order to increase production capacity, Tesla, Inc. has invested a lot. According to the Q1 financial report, the company's R & D expenses8.7 亿The dollar, which accounts for 4.6% of revenue, has been at the same level for the past two years and is very stable.

Tesla, Inc. 's research and development of "banknote ability" has played a significant role in the integrated casting process. The so-called integrated casting process is to highly integrate the originally complex and scattered parts and turn them into large aluminum castings through a large tonnage die casting machine.

Take Model Y as an example, the casting need for the position of the rear soleplate should be completed.70 个Parts, but through the integrated die-casting process, 70 parts are die-cast into two large castings, saving 2 hours of assembly process.

At the Austin plant, this process is applied to the front and rear ends of Model Y, and the efficiency is even more amazing.

After the Berlin plant opened and put into production this year, this integrated die-casting process has also been applied to the whole car body through technical improvements, saving secondary heat treatment and further improving the production efficiency of the car body.

At the same time, Tesla, Inc. expects that the 4680 batteries mass produced this year will further enhance the competitiveness of products and reduce production costs.

In addition, Tesla, Inc. also has his own countermeasures for the internal production environment of the factory.

At the end of February this year, Tesla, Inc. conducted an environmental impact assessment on the parts production public welfare promotion project of the Shanghai factory, increasing the equipment operating rate and parts production capacity to increase production capacity.

According to the EIA report, Tesla, Inc. has added new production processes such as power battery, electric drive assembly and integrated forming of lower car body to manufacture key parts of new energy vehicles, which were originally scheduled to be completed in April.

There are unexpected events in the sky, even from the technology to the factory link, Tesla, Inc. has maintained a progressive pace, but there are still many uncontrollable external factors. For example, due to the impact of the epidemic, the Shanghai super factory stopped production.

At this time, the advantages of Tesla, Inc. 's four super factories that produce cars around the world are reflected-if any factory reduces or stops production, other factories can still produce as usual, thus helping Tesla, Inc. alleviate the capacity crisis. give factories that have reduced or stopped production a certain amount of time to recover.

At the beginning of this year, the Texas factory, which is 10 times larger than the Shanghai factory, was officially put into production, providing the basic conditions for the centralization of all automobile production links.

According to Musk's opening ceremony in Texas, the factory integrates all aspects of production, bringing in raw materials from the entrance and turning it into a new car from another door after it has been transferred inside the factory.

For example, Tesla, Inc. 's Berlin factory only takes 10 hours to produce a Model Y, which is equivalent to a night's sleep, and a car is right in front of you.

Selling fuel cars doesn't make money, but selling new energy cars makes money?

Is it profitable to sell new energy cars?

For this question, at different stages of development, different types of car companies have different answers.

In the camp where traditional fuel cars started, Honda chief executive Toshihiro Mibu believes that electric cars are more like household appliances and that Honda's electrification process is more in line with electrification policies around the world.

But Tesla, Inc. Q1 gross profit margin32.5% of the data completely broke the saying that "new energy vehicles do not make money".

By contrast, the business gross profit margin of BBA, which consumers are familiar with, is also at a disadvantage. The results show that BMW's gross profit margin in 2021 is 17.6%, Mercedes-Benz 12.7%, Audi 10.7%, and Tesla, Inc. is on average 2.5 times higher than BBA gross profit margin.

The reason why Tesla, Inc. 's gross profit margin can climb rapidly is more complicated, in addition to expanding production, improving efficiency to amortize costs, and making use of economies of scale to make profits, but also lies in the changes brought about by the "new energy car track".

Change takes the lead in the business model.

Traditional fuel cars sell cars at the front end, and consumers get what they see. After seeing a model in a 4S store, there is almost no room for matching. They can only choose the appearance and interior of the car. Car companies lack flexible space to sell cars.

At the same time, the after-sales service of traditional fuel vehicles only includes repair and maintenance. But the new energy vehicle business is obviously not so simple, at present, almost all new energy vehicle companies, in addition to the appearance and interior for consumers to choose, but also provide different functions of the intelligent cockpit and different levels of self-driving functions.

Taking Tesla, Inc. Model Y as an example, it provides consumers with two power solutions of rear wheel drive and dual-motor all-wheel drive. On autopilot, it also provides enhanced autopilot and fully autopilot capabilities, both of which cost users extra money. The former costs 32000 yuan and the latter 64000 yuan.

Similarly, extreme Fox Alpha is the same operation. For example, the higher version of Alpha S Huawei HI with advanced autopilot capability is more expensive than Alpha 525S.17.8万。

Providing consumers with diversified configuration options is precisely the reason why new energy vehicles have more profit space than fuel vehicles, and in the future, new energy vehicle companies represented by Tesla, Inc. are likely to further enhance profitability through "hardware and software" parallelism.

Among themOTAIt may become one of the biggest sources of revenue for car companies in the future. to put it simply, OTA is to upgrade the in-car software and self-driving level to improve the tram experience, intelligent level, and open fees to users.

In last year's Q4 conference call, Tesla, Inc. regarded the software business with FSD as the core profit source for Tesla, Inc. and thought that the software business would have considerable imagination.

This year Q1 Musk also mentioned FSD again and confirmed that FSD will bring technical advantages to the new business of Robotaxi in the future.

So what car companies sell is not the car itself, but the choice of car owners and the ability to connect everything, which also makes the business scope of new energy vehicles more imaginative than traditional fuel vehicles.

New energy vehicles continue to expand their profit range, but also in the innovation of car sales model, becoming more "money-saving".

To sort out the sales mode of traditional fuel vehicles, basically the dealers earn the price difference, the marketing way of organizing offline activities, the profits taken by dealers and the costs brought by offline activities, all make the profits of traditional fuel car companies further compressed.

And Tesla, Inc.? After Tesla, Inc. 's financial report Q1 was released, Musk replied proudly on Twitter: "Tesla, Inc. has a market capitalization of 1 trillion US dollars.，$0 advertising expenditure」。

Most people may think it's impossible, but if you think about it, you've never seen Tesla, Inc. appear on airport billboards and social media opening pages.

Although domestic new energy car companies still have a lot of investment in marketing and need to move 4S stores into the core of shopping malls and place advertisements to further improve brand recognition, however, the "direct operation" model commonly adopted by new energy car companies can obviously pocket most of the profits, making the gross margin more competitive.

In addition, Tesla, Inc., as a mature brand, has provided a reference route for electric vehicles to "reduce marketing costs". It can be expected that with the improvement of brand awareness of domestic car companies, car companies will also choose this way to cut costs and further improve profit margins in the future.

Some people may want to ask, among the new energy car companies, Tesla, Inc. is the only one to maintain high profit margins, individual cases can not explain the situation of the industry.

However, if you pay attention to the situation of the new forces of car building in China, you will find that the average interest rates of NIO Inc., ideal and XPeng Inc. are all 10% on average, and the ideal has reached 21.1%. Take ideal as an example, ideal sales for the whole year of 2021 will be 90491 vehicles, an increase of 177.4% compared with 32624 vehicles in 2020. the gross profit margin of 2021 will be 21.3%, an increase of 4.9% over the same period. NIO Inc., the ideal situation is also similar.

To sum up, there is always a positive correlation between the sales of new energy vehicles and the gross profit margin of car companies, which also confirms that the rise of gross profit margin of domestic new energy vehicle enterprises is only a matter of time and scale, and the new energy vehicle industry is still worth looking forward to.

However, new energy car companies do not always have a magnanimous future and smooth sailing. Tesla, Inc. and all new energy car companies face the same problems. That's the problem of raw materials and the supply chain.

During the Q1 earnings call, many analysts kept asking Musk a series of questions about the rising prices of nickel and lithium needed for batteries and the supply chain. Musk admitted that this was a major challenge for Tesla, Inc.. But he also released three ways to deal with the challenge:

(1) set up a factory to collect lithium. When everything is in place, Musk believes that Tesla, Inc. 's lithium supply will not be a problem in the next 1-2 years.

(2) Recycling. Tesla, Inc. will collect the remaining waste from the super factory, which can collect about 50 tons a week, and Musk also revealed that he will recycle fuel vehicles to supplement Tesla, Inc. 's car-making materials.

(3) establish long-term cooperative relationship with suppliers.

These methods may provide some reference for domestic new energy car companies.