Tesla Revenue Up 65% -- Beating Wall Street Estimates by Over $1 Billion

Tesla stock is up 1,400% over the past three years, and in its most recent quarterly earnings announcement, the electric vehicle maker reported that its revenue rose 65% year over year in the fourth quarter. That number, $17.7 billion, beat analyst expectations by more than $1 billion. In this episode of "3 Minute Stocks Updates" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 2, host Brian Feroldi goes over the recent impressive facts and figures of this investor fan favorite.

Brian Feroldi: Moving on to Tesla, which is always an easy company to cover in three minutes. [laughs] But let's start with the operational stuff. We knew a lot of this going into the quarter, but total production was up 70% companywide. More than that was just from Model 3 and Model Y, which continue to sell like hotcakes. Model S and Model X production are rounding errors, but they're moving rapidly in the right direction. As a quick reminder, the company just refreshed both of these. It took deliveries down to, production down to zero earlier this year and starting to reramp them back up, so all good there. The number of leases that are active at the end of the quarter continues to grow rapidly, and global vehicle inventory supply is down to just four days. Four days of global inventory supply. They pushed a lot of vehicles out at the end of the year. The storage and the solar totals continued to lag. I think some of that is just still because of the chip shortage and the company's extreme focus on Model 3 and Model Y. The number of service locations, mobile fleet up nicely, and is the Supercharger network continues to grow, so overall operationally, the company is doing good there. Now, financially, the story gets even better. Revenue was up 65% to 17.7 billion. That beats Wall Street estimates by more than $1 billion despite the fact that Wall Street knew the production and delivery numbers ahead of time. Just as impressive to me, consolidated gross margin 27.4% companywide, operating margin 14.7%, and non-GAAP margin 13.1%. Free cash flow during the quarter 2.8 billion, non-GAAP net income 2.9 billion, and non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share up 219%. That's that strong operating leverage kicking in. Company's balance sheet is in fantastic shape, $17.5 billion in cash, $6.4 billion in total debt. The company continues to make paying off debt a priority. Now, from the call, the big news for investors to note is that the Cybertruck, the Roadster, and the Semi all being delayed till 2023. Why? The company noted that the chip shortages, basically all the available chips are going into the Model 3 and Model Y, the Model S, and the Model X. They said, we could launch those vehicles this year; however, doing so would cause us to deliver less overall vehicles, so they're prioritizing deliveries of 3 and Y. Major areas of the focus right now from an R&D perspective, though, are full self-driving. That's the company's essentially No. 1 priority and "full self-driving will become the most important profit center for Tesla over time." The company believes that it's going to be wildly profitable once it gets out there. Another major focus is Optimus, which is the company's Tesla Bot. Elon Musk thinks that the robot business will dwarf the company's car and FSD business in time. Take that for what it's worth. Meanwhile, the production goal of the year is the company expects to grow annual deliveries by at least 50%. It noted that it could get 50% growth just from its existing Gigafactories. Never mind the two, Texas and Berlin, that are coming online this year. It's also making a big push into get insurance out to more people and hopes to have it available to 80% of drivers before the end of the year. For me, the big takeaways are, demand is crazy strong, financials are really good, that chip shortage stinks but it's getting better, and full self-driving is the company's No. 1 priority.