Tesla is preparing for an earnings call that could well determine its fate for the near future. Since the start of the year, Tesla has faced innumerable compounding challenges that have led it to a crossroads with investors as it approaches its first-quarter earnings call this Tuesday.
“This is the most important conference call in many years for [Tesla CEO Elon] Musk to lay out how Tesla is going to navigate this category 5 storm,” Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives told Fortune.
Many Tesla investors were willing to put up with CEO Elon Musk’s widely covered behavior—his split attention with X; off-color remarks, the worst of which have been bigoted; and the lack of clear guidance about when new models would be released—so long as the stock kept up its stellar performance. But since the start of the year Tesla’s stock has fallen 43%. Tesla also had its first quarterly sales decline in four years. All this comes as the global EV market seems to be flatlining rather than growing, as many carmakers predicted. All that has some of Tesla’s investors imploring Musk to take their concerns to heart.
“If Musk is flippant again and there is no adult in the room on this conference call with no answers, then darker days are ahead,” Ives wrote in an analyst note last week.
When Tesla released a report last month that showed deliveries of new cars were down 8.5% year over year, investors lost their resolve. They began fearing the worst: that the company’s erratic CEO had led it astray and that the highly competitive EV market would gobble up a company with no clear direction.
“Musk is Tesla, and Tesla is Musk,” Ives said. “But you need a committed CEO that’s going to handhold investors through this black-cloud storm.”
Tesla’s sales slipped as competition heats up
The fact that Tesla telegraphed to investors about a month in advance of its earnings call that it had a quarterly sales decline for the first time in four years could be a sign of just how bad things may be behind the scenes. The EV market has softened, making concerns over Musk’s focus all the more acute. In particular, investors wonder when exactly the highly anticipated, affordable Model 2 will come out. As of now, it is scheduled for 2025, although several analysts expect Tesla will announce a delay of those plans on Tuesday’s earnings call.
Without the Model 2, which is rumored to cost less than $30,000, some analysts don’t believe Tesla will be able to turn around its poor first-quarter performance. “I absolutely do not think it’s a one-off,” says Per Lekander, managing partner at Clean Energy Transition, an investment firm that focuses on sustainability.
With the sense that Tesla could delay the launch of its Model 2, the company won’t have enough new models to meet customer demand, according to Lekander. For a long time Tesla was not just one of the best EVs on the market, but virtually the only one.
“Elon realized that you can make a muscle car out of an EV and got the first-mover advantage,” Lekander said. “The incumbents woke up late. But the last few years they’ve invested like crazy.”
After Tesla’s early successes, automakers around the globe—in Europe, China, and the U.S., in particular—are all planning to enter the EV market in a major way. In the U.S., manufacturers raced to build as many EVs as possible under the impression that consumers were clamoring for them, but pulled back over the last few months. Now the EV market doesn’t appear to be growing as fast as automakers had hoped. In the U.S., GM and Ford both had to walk back some of their ambitious EV goals. GM had to abandon plans to construct 400,000 EVs by the end of this year, while Ford said it was delaying some $12 billion in investments it had previously earmarked for vehicle production and to build a supply chain for EV batteries.
The broader slowdown has been further exacerbated by new Chinese entrants into the global EV market. Chinese tech company BYD announced plans to expand its EV sales outside of China, although not in the U.S. yet. BYD’s ramped-up competition has been causing Tesla no shortage of headaches within the world’s second-largest economy.
“In China, the market continues to grow very healthily, but competition is so fierce,” Lekander said.
Tesla’s next move: the Model 2 or robo-taxis?
One of the things investors will be looking for most during the earnings call is clear guidance on the Model 2 and when it’s expected to hit the road. Leading into the call, though, it doesn’t seem like Tesla is as committed to the Model 2 as investors would hope. Instead Tesla has indicated it will prioritize self-driving robo-taxis to pull itself out of its current sales slump.
“Not quite betting the company, but going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move,” Musk wrote on X last week. “Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage.”
Last week, Deutsche Bank cited Tesla’s shifting focus to robo-taxis as the main reason for downgrading its stock in a widely circulated analyst note. Where exactly the release of the rumored Model 2 fits in with Tesla’s self-driving ambitions has investors waiting with bated breath.
“The most important part of the call is the Model 2 strategy,” Ives said. “If they go away from Model 2 and the sub-$30,000 vehicle and just bet on robo0-taxis, which won’t hit the road for another six years, that’d be a game changer.”
In the meantime, Tesla is trying to get prospective customers interested in its self-driving software by cutting prices and offering free trials to first-time buyers. The software, branded as full self-driving (FSD) despite requiring human supervision, is sold as a subscription for Tesla owners. Over the weekend, Tesla cut the annual price for FSD from $12,000 to $8,000 a year.
Even believers in Tesla see Musk’s harping on autonomous vehicles as a distraction from the critical short-term issue of getting back to positive sales growth, according to Ives.
“The long-term story is still there,” Ives said. “But the plane is crashing into the ocean, and Musk can’t be worried about salted or unsalted pretzels.”
So far, Tesla has tried a few other moves to reverse its sales declines, including advertising for the first time in its history and expanding into India. Investors welcomed the decision to advertise when it was first announced last May, given the competitiveness of the automobile industry and that many other carmakers spend large sums on advertising every year. Over the course of this year, Tesla began digital advertising on places like social media and YouTube. While its India expansion might pay dividends down the road, given the country’s size, it is still too early to see any material impact in the coming months.
However, the plans to break into the India market may have to wait. On Friday, Musk announced he would postpone a visit to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi because “very heavy Tesla commitments” meant he had to stay in the U.S.
