Tesla (TSLA)

Investment Thesis

  • Market leader in electric vehicles, riding strong tailwinds as the world transitions to clean energy
  • Strong competitive advantage in vertically-integrated advanced manufacturing
  • Potential upside from autonomous driving if FSD can achieve level 5 autonomy, robo-taxi network
  • Potential to become world’s largest end-to-end transportation and energy company
  • For growth investors with high risk tolerance and long term investment horizon

Company Overview

Tesla designs, develops, manufactures, leases and sells electric vehicles and electric generation and storage systems. Key business segments are:

  • Automotive (~95% of revenue) – Model S/3/X/Y, Semi/Cybertruck/Roadster, Superchargers
  • Energy generation and storage (~5% of revenue) – Powerwall, Solar Roof, Megapack

Bull Case

  • Strong brand and loyal fans
  • Global trend towards renewable energy generation and electric vehicles (EV)
  • Rapid pace of innovation in manufacturing capabilities and battery cell technology
  • Full self-driving (FSD) – currently paid upfront during purchase, soon to be subscription service, additional recurring revenue, potential robo-taxi network
  • Supercharger network – potential for allowing EVs from other automakers to charge for a fee
  • Solar roof, megapack – greater focus in 2021-2022, potential for distributed power grid
  • Tesla Dojo Supercomputer – used to train neural networks for autonomous driving capability
  • Sales growth in China – friendly regulatory environment for EVs in China, China battling pollution
  • Biden-Harris administration may increase tax credit and other incentives for purchases of EVs
  • Raised substantial capital, cash on hand $17.5B, positive FCF $2.2B [as of Q1 2022]
  • Visionary and technically-capable CEO Elon Musk

Bear Case

  • Overvalued – Tesla market cap is larger than all other automakers combined despite only having a small market share
  • EV competition from legacy automakers is coming – GM, Ford (US); VW (Europe); Nio, Xpeng, BYD, Li Auto (China)

Potential Catalysts

  • Semi / Cybertruck production ramp up in late 2021 / 2022 (delayed to mid-2023)
  • Gigafactory Berlin & Texas production ramp progress
  • Gigafactory India? – Seems have dropped off
  • $25k “Model 2” announcement – No signs yet

Risks / Concerns

  • Price correlation to Bitcoin, which Tesla holds as part of their treasury – reduced position in Q2 2022
  • Tesla unable to solve Level 5 autonomy – Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy leaving, what’s the impact?
  • Fatal accidents while on FSD beta impacting confidence under NTSB investigation
  • Lithium-ion battery supply shortage – Will Tesla buy a lithium mine?
  • China’s zero COVID policy lockdowns affecting production – Shanghai factory shutdown in April 2022

Competitors

  • Traditional automakers: Volkswagen, GM, Ford
  • Autonomous driving tech: Waymo (Google), Baidu, Mobileye

Valuation

  • Expensive by traditional valuation metrics [as of 12 May 2022]
    • P/S 15.8x – Market cap $896B on $63B Revenue (TTM)
    • Trailing P/E 117x, Forward P/E 72x – Diluted EPS (TTM) $7.4

Analysts

  • Tipranks average analyst PT $212.58 (30% upside) [as of 21 Apr 2023]

Resources

Disclosure: I am long TSLA

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