2023-08-16 08:11:00
Elon Musk is known for his sometimes ingenious, sometimes brutal moves. The South African is currently happy regarding 466,000 vehicle deliveries in the second quarter of 2023. This means a sales increase of ten percent compared to the first quarter of this year. Compared to the period from July to September 2022, the billionaire was able to increase sales by 35 percent.
Margin sank at Tesla drastically
However: Musk sells his models at competitive prices, says the German car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer. “The operating margin was still 17.2 percent in the third quarter of 2022, in the second quarter of this year it was only 9.6 percent,” says Dudenhöffer. His assumption: “The decline in the margin in the pure vehicle business is likely to be even greater, because Tesla is now also making money with the supercharger network and the services.”
How brutal the “price war” (O-Ton Dudenhöffer) is now is documented by the average prices of the Tesla models, which fell from $57,331 in the second quarter of the previous year to $45,626 in the same period of 2023. In short: Tesla is selling more cars while sales are falling. Dudenhöffer calculated that these price maneuvers would have cost Musk 3.2 billion US dollars (2.9 billion euros).
Nevertheless, the US automaker’s “war chest” is still full, says the German car expert. Musk can easily make further price cuts to keep the competition at bay. Analysts doubt whether Tesla can outperform its Chinese competitor BYD in the long term. The Chinese have already overtaken the Americans in terms of sales: in the first half of the year, Tesla sold 890,000 vehicles, while BYD sold 1.256 million. However, Musk can be happy regarding the much higher margin, but the gap is melting.
Conclusion: It seems to be a race on the electric car market between Tesla and BYD. Maybe similar to hare and hedgehog, and BYD seems to be the hedgehog. (Heb)
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