US electric car maker Tesla has announced a stock split to make its stock certificates more accessible to small investors.
The company and its billionaire CEO Elon Musk announced, following the US stock market closed, that its board of directors would approve a 3:1 split, if shareholders approved the move at their annual meeting in August.
3:1 means that everyone who owns one share will own two more to have three shares.
Tesla had already announced in March that it was planning a stock split, but the percentage was not announced.
The electric car company announced a similar five-to-one stock split in August 2020.
A stock split does not actually change the market value of a company, but lowers the share price.
Tesla’s shares have been under great pressure recently, in a general downward spiral of the markets.
Since the stock price rose last November, it has fallen by more than 40%.
Tesla’s share of global sales fell to its lowest level in more than three years, due to the closure measures that were imposed on the Chinese city of Shanghai to limit the spread of the new Corona virus during the first months of this year.
And the Bloomberg news agency indicated that Tesla’s Model 3 sales during last April amounted to 39,650 cars, a decrease of 78% from last March.
Dan Levy, US auto market analyst at Swiss Bank Credit Suisse, said that Tesla’s share of electric car sales in the world last April fell to 10%, compared to 27% during the previous month.
Bloomberg indicated that Tesla will need a long time to restore normal production rates to its Shanghai factory, which was closed for three weeks, starting in late March, due to Corona restrictions.
Currently, thousands of Tesla workers in Shanghai work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to restore the factory’s production speed.
Many workers also sleep inside the factory in the framework of what is known as the closed bubble system to prevent the emergence of infections with the Corona virus among workers.
Tesla sales fell sharply in the first month of the quarter compared to the last month of the previous quarter.
Elon Musk said the company focuses on making cars for export markets at the start of every quarter, which is the time it takes to get these cars to customers every three months.
And last September, Musk said on Twitter to communicate with the meeting that he hopes to reduce these fluctuations that occur at the end of each quarter, and that with the start of production at the giant Tesla plant in Germany, production and sales will be more organized.