Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
If demand for Tesla vehicles is as strong as Tesla has indicated in the past, why cut price?
Does the company want to maximize profit margin per vehicle, or maximize profit for the company as a whole? To increase earnings per share at a given level of debt (i.e. not looking at financing tricks to increase shareholder returns at the cost of increased shareholder risk), they should maximize profit as a whole.
Lower prices will increase the potential sales volume while also reducing profit per car... finding the price where the sales volume multiplied by the per-car profit is maximized is where they should set the price.
It was a Bank of America analyst whose words were quoted... maybe the point was to sow doubt and fear to lower the stock price among the public sheep so Bank of America can get a larger stock position? They are not one of the top institutional holders:
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/institutional-holdings
|
|
tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
|
|
If demand for Tesla....why cut price?
Ask yourself. Why not stay with the roadster S and x? Why cut price of a model3?
Why cut the price of the S and x by a couple grand last fall?
Get where this is going? Accelerate the worlds transition to sustainable transport maybe?
Hmmmmmm, whose mission statement is that again?
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
Bishop,CA
|
|
To accelerate sustainable world transport the cars need to be about $12,000 or less.
Can they get there?
As world wide production goes up rapidly what will happen with the price of batteries?
What will happen when the robots start breaking? How much will it cost to keep machines running going from 1,000 unit per week to 20,000?
It may all work out - he has lots of money. & he is smart! A jerk but smart!
|
|
tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
|
|
Yup. Check out the companies now making cars for that. Not American companies, but the mission statement doesn’t say inspire Ford and GM only.
I’m glad you were smart enough not to say that they had to be under 12k(USD?) AND over 200 miles of range. No matter what Tesla does, people who don’t keep up on what is happening will always retort, well that’s fine, but what really needs to happen is X. And usually X is already happening or in the pipeline. With Americans’ prevailing attitudes about this I can see China/Europe easily overtaking you in this market.
|
|
couchmaster
climber
|
|
For the Elon Musk haters (Reilly, talkin to you:-)
....Tesla isn’t a car company, it’s a battery company.”
“Tesla isn’t a car manufacturer competing with other automobile manufacturers…Tesla’s vehicles are consumers of the company’s main product: batteries,” Dans concludes. “Rethink your models and your spreadsheets: stop seeing Tesla as a carmaker and start understanding that the company has much more ambitious plans for the future.”"
https://insideevs.com/tesla-secret-weapon-intense-focus-batteries/
...and again, for myself, I agree with many here that the stock is wildly overpriced at $350 a share.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
Tesla is a far superior intelligent company compared to the rest of the behemoths.
They're not stuck in the caveman mode ......
The real future of gross materialists mobile transportation technology will not be battery powered but magnetic propulsion ......
And far superior to all that is sound vibration propulsion.
One can travel to any planet in the entire cosmic manifestation on that platform without any mechanical need.
Thousands of years ago they traveled like this.
Modern gross materialists are just puffed up cavemen masquerading as advanced.
This method is far beyond the pay scale of the caveman gross materialists .....
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
All technologies are always already there and have been since the beginning.
The more one purifies their consciousness from the constraints of the material energies the more they become visible ......
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
MGuzzy: I've toured the Giga plant.. its truly an amazing vision of the future of manufacturing.
I recently visited a friend who works at that plant. I was passing through Reno on the way back to southern Tucson from Oregon, and I hadn’t seen him for a few years. We only got an hour or so together at a local bar / recharging station about a mile away. My friend has a Ph.D. in materials, and he is very busy—which is why we could only see each other for 90 minutes. He loves the area for all the sports in the area (skiing, ultra marathon running, biking) and a dream house and new wife. He asked me if I wanted to see the plant, and I said no. When we met for lunch, he said the plant’s practices are not safe (“horrendous” is the word he used). He said Musk has fired people on the spot for reminding him of an OSHA regulation or two (“we’re supposed to be wearing safety shoes, Elon”). My friend also said that 50% of the people that are hired at the plant leave within a year. My friend at said that many people could find a job there: “you don’t need to be up on technology; you need to be a problem-solver.”
“Growth hides a multitude of sins.” Companies that are rushing to scale run many risks financially, production-wise, with workers (selection, training, development, retention, terminations) and with managers. It’s difficult to list them all. The drive for growth to gain scale and cover new or empty market spaces (competitive pre-emption) and placate share and debt holders will work for most firms as long as overall demand remains strong (+15% year). Once demand begins to come off, weaker firms will begin to stumble and fall—called a “shakeout.” Deep pockets may help the weaker firms for a while, but invariably firms not-well managed will fall by the wayside or exit, deep pockets notwithstanding.
Historically, a great number of well-heeled firms could not make transitions to new technologies: one can look at the computer industry, the automotive industry itself a century ago, and semiconductor equipment manufacturers. It’s very difficult for leaders in one technology to graduate to the next new technology. Academically, I’d want to know just how different the technologies are for electronic automobiles and to what extent it must be developed in-house (because knowledge and skills are difficult to come by). Research by Tushman & Anderson many years ago suggests why. To what extent are new technologies really different? Are they the result of competence-enhancement, or are they competence-destroying?
Here are a couple of images from an old presentation that might help to understand the issues that revolve around competence.
Be well.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
Thanks, Mike, most illustrative. Hope Elon doesn’t sue you.
I toured the Gothenburg Volvo plant in June. Really amazing, but not just for the high tech.*
Yes, they produce 5 models on one line. Yes, there are 1400 robots at work. The most
amazing thing is how happy everyone looked. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the Swedish
Bikini Team working there but the job turnover rate is virtually zero anyway. Safety? Volvo
invented safety, in their cars and on the factory floor. To combat boredom and promote
camaraderie (not difficult with Swedes anyway) everybody changes jobs every 90-120 minutes!
*You watch your cell phone being put in a locked drawer before you get on the tram.
BTW, for you reading comprehension challenged types - I don’t “hate” TSLA. I dislike Elon
and think his company is poorly run. The Model S is a very good car, as long as it doesn’t
burst into flames. The Model 3 is butt ugly but may be serviceable. It should be for $50K!
I went by one the other day that looked like it had a pre-oxidized paint job. I couldn’t believe
somebody accepted it. I dunno, maybe they’re in a grunge band.
|
|
monolith
climber
state of being
|
|
The Ted guy didn't mention how man could prevent the solar winds from stripping the geo-engineered atmosphere away, as it did earlier.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
There are already living entities living on Mars.
St00pid people want to go there by mechanical means.
Earthlings can't live there.
You can go there in your next life (no space ship needed) and enter an appropriate martian material body if you want and continue wasting your time ....
|
|
wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
|
|
Werner ,could you send me some of that sh#t,man ,it must be good.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
Reilly: I dislike Elon and think his company is poorly run.
In all fairness, I would say it would be very difficult to find a fast-growing company that was well-managed. In the growth state of a market, the objective is: don’t loose share! Keep up, or drive down the production supply curve and beat competitors to lower cost structures.
Some companies in the old world (mainly Texas Instruments) drove down the production curve so significantly that no competitor could come close to their costs (and hence lower prices). Boston Consulting Group established itself by teaching other companies that strategy of driving down cost curves pre-emptively and pricing *ahead of costs*--where costs would be when the product would be made. That's a very gutsy strategy.
When the shakeout starts in any growth industry, the surviving firms will pick up the share the fallen will have left behind. Then the game shifts to efficiencies across the spectrum to the other functions. But in the growth stage, it’s all about production. Ramping-up scale is the strategy that matters.
In an evolutionary sense, most every firm must succumb to industry dynamics (unless one is a monopolist). Industry effects tend to swamp company effects for most firms. The very best CEOs (Gates comes to mind, although many don’t care for him—“The Evil Empire”) have a feel for industry evolutionary dynamics and gear up for the next phase before it emerges. But that’s tough to do because of the apparent urgency in the current phase of an industry’s evolution. Few CEOs or GMs can extract themselves from day-to-day operations to focus on and prepare for the long-run. As one popular academic put it: “Every entrepreneur must learn to work on the business rather than in it.” That tends to mean subordinating product development to organization development.
Try telling that to an entrepreneur who believes that if it weren’t for him, success would have been impossible. Indeed, often that is exactly the case; but it doesn’t change industry requirements. Like the rest of us plebes, we need to be self-reflective and develop ourselves to move ahead.
I’m attaching another image that may be able to shine some light on industry dynamics and growth. Please note that the slide presents a highly idealized model / curve. An industry’s S-curve can be elongated horizontally, compressed horizontally, and can exhibit repeated instantiations upward with rapid new technology introductions—as one might see in the semi-conductor equipment manufacturing industry. Rarely did a winner from a previous technological revolution win in the next round: too much to learn (and unlearn if one is an incumbent).
|
|
the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
|
|
As seen on SpaceX's walkway to the Dragon spacecraft.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
|
Jan 11, 2019 - 07:42am PT
|
When yer on a mission from God you can park any damn way you like!
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
Bishop,CA
|
|
|
Jan 11, 2019 - 11:50am PT
|
Tooth where do you get your #'s?
Tesla Model 3 sales 145,846 U.S. & Canada 2018
Corolla U.S. only 303,732.
|
|
tooth
Trad climber
B.C.
|
|
|
Jan 14, 2019 - 06:57pm PT
|
Frummy it looks like your numbers are the same as mine. But you may have been confused by assuming a corolla was a premium vehicle. Which it isn't. If you look at month to month sales numbers, the 3 is getting close to outselling the cheap cars by the end of the year too - once production had half ramped up. As I said, once they sell the no frills trim on the 3 - we can start to compare the numbers with the corollas and civics which sell in that price range. Sorry I didn't spell it out clearer at first.
145,000 US and Canada = 140 us and 5 Canada.
For example - in Dec 2018 Model3 sold 25,250. Corolla sold 23,793. Just a single month, not the entire year. Don't get confused on that either.Also, this is just cars. Don't confuse yourself by comparing to truck numbers like the F-150.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
|
Jan 18, 2019 - 08:25am PT
|
TSLA -9%
They’ve also ended their free supercharging program and referral system.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!