With Tesla's (TSLA -1.80%) first-quarter update on vehicle deliveries out, investors now have some data to chew on to inform their estimates for the full year. Will the electric car maker be able to keep up the staggering growth it served investors last year? Or could an uncertain economy weigh on sales, leading to a slowdown in the company's growth rate?
Based on Tesla's strong start to the year, 2023 will likely go down in the books as another year of soaring sales for the automaker. Of course, nothing is certain in a market like this. Whatever vehicle delivery figures Tesla achieves this year, the two biggest determinants will be demand trends and the company's output at its new factories in Berlin and Texas.
Production
Tesla's vehicle production is off to a good start in 2023. The electric car maker produced a record 440,808 vehicles during the first quarter, up 44% year over year. Production levels this high give the company plenty of momentum to deliver strong sales growth yet again this year.
Looking ahead, production will likely increase even more. But the extent of production growth throughout the year will depend largely on how well the continued ramp-up in production at Tesla's Berlin and Texas factories goes. In its fourth-quarter 2022 update, Tesla said that the new factories have tooling installed for production levels of more than 500,000 units (capacity for over 250,000 at each factory). But it takes time to ramp up to target production levels, and Tesla could run into unforeseen challenges.
Though both factories were in operation toward the end of 2022, their production volumes were limited. As production lines at these factories are fine-tuned, Tesla's production volume could increase substantially.
Demand
While curveballs are always possible when it comes to production (evidenced by some factory shutdowns in China last year due to COVID-19), the biggest wildcard this year surrounding predicting Tesla's deliveries is demand.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk emphasized in Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call that demand wasn't an issue at the time. Indeed, he said that recent price cuts to its vehicles had actually led to a surge in orders. But investors shouldn't rule out the possibility of higher interest rates negatively impacting Tesla's order volume (and, ultimately, deliveries) at some point during the year.
All this said, Tesla's first-quarter delivery numbers showed no signs that demand is lagging supply in any meaningful way yet. Deliveries for the quarter were 422,875, or 96% of the company's production volume. That's a high proportion of deliveries, especially considering Tesla management has said inventory could build throughout the year as the company works to make its deliveries more efficient.
If demand is weakening for Tesla's vehicles, it's not yet evident in the company's delivery numbers, which were up 36% year over year.
In light of Tesla's recent quarterly production and delivery numbers, it looks like the company could, once again, grow deliveries at high rates this year. While achieving the 40% year-over-year growth in deliveries that Tesla pulled off last year may be a stretch, 30%-plus growth for the full year is quite possible. That would translate to more than 1.7 million vehicles, up from about 1.3 million in 2022.
