Tesla CEO Elon Musk introducing plans for the Semi on Nov. 16, 2017.
Photo: Alexis Georgeson/Tesla Motors/Zuma PressTesla Inc. investors pushed the auto maker’s stock to more than $1,000 a share Wednesday, lifting its valuation closer to Toyota Motor Corp.’s, after Chief Executive Elon Musk told employees it was time to begin volume production of the company’s long-promised, all-electric semitrailer truck.
Mr. Musk said in a memo to employees late Tuesday night it was time to bring out the all-electric Tesla Semi truck without saying where it would be assembled or when. Battery production for the truck, he wrote, would occur at the company’s battery factory outside of Reno, Nev. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The pronouncement comes after Wall Street in recent days sent shares of rival-startup Nikola Corp. rising to about three times the price since trading began last week, giving the Phoenix-based electric truck company a market value greater than Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV despite having never sold a vehicle. It briefly this week surpassed Ford Motor Co. by value, too, before falling more than 18% Wednesday.
The overall investor enthusiasm is part of a broader excitement for electric vehicles and a belief that the future of ground transportation may be powered with batteries not gasoline, even though customers haven’t yet flocked to the technology.
That excitement has helped more than double the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s stock price this year, despite concerns over the global coronavirus pandemic and fears of an extended recession that might dampen demand for new vehicles. Its shares closed at $1025.05, rising 9% on the day, giving the company a market value of more than $190 billion. That puts Tesla’s valuation nearer that of Toyota, which at $216 billion has long been the world’s largest auto maker by market value.
Before the pandemic hit, this year was seen by many analysts and investors as the moment Tesla would finally capitalize on years of investments in factories and new products envisioned as part of Mr. Musk’s vision of making electric vehicles mainstream. A new factory in China, which started car deliveries late last year, and the arrival of its latest product, the Model Y compact sport-utility vehicle, was expected to help Tesla achieve its first annual profit as Mr. Musk predicted increasing deliveries globally more than 36% to over 500,000 vehicles.
Those delivery targets are now in question after local government efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus shut down Tesla’s lone U.S. assembly factory starting in late March. It reopened last month and workers are racing to make up for lost time. In a separate memo over the weekend, Mr. Musk told workers that ramping production of the Model Y was the company’s top priority. Despite the turbulence, Wall Street still expects a full-year profit for Tesla.
The reveal of the Semi, along with a new version of the Roadster sports car, in late 2017 helped reignite excitement in the company when Mr. Musk and his team were struggling to build the company’s Model 3 compact car. The company, at the time, said the Semi truck, which is designed to go 500 miles on a single charge, would come out in 2019.
From the Archives
That didn’t happen. In January, Tesla said the Semi would begin deliveries in 2021. Mr. Musk told analysts that part of the reason Tesla had delayed the truck’s production was to avoid cannibalizing battery supply for the Model 3 and Model Y. Mr. Musk’s latest memo was earlier reported by Reuters.
Mr. Musk has promised to boost battery availability. “This is very fundamental and extremely difficult,” Mr. Musk said in January, promising to later detail plans for the company’s battery strategy. The announcement of those plans is expected sometime this month.
Mr. Musk also is looking to set up a second assembly facility in the U.S., in part for the company’s coming electric pickup, the Cybertruck.
Rival Nikola recently surprised investors by saying it was pulling forward plans for a pickup truck and would begin taking orders on June 29. It previously said the pickup, which will be powered by both an electric battery and hydrogen fuel-cells, wasn’t a priority. Nikola has said it plans to begin deliveries of its first electric semitrailer truck in 2021.
In a sign of a possible stepped up competition to come, Nikola Chief Executive Trevor Miltontook to Twitter on Wednesday, writing, “I love the competition! Tesla’s call to mass produce a semi is a good thing to Nikola’s business model no matter what.”
—Ben Foldy contributed to this article.
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Tesla Shares Soar Past $1,000 on Elon Musk’s Plan to Move Forward With Semi Truck - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment