Anyone hoping to ratchet the Tesla Motors hype down a notch will want to ignore the company’s second quarter results delivered Wednesday afternoon. Tesla turned a profit much to the surprise of Wall Street analysts and said it shipped a record number of its Model S luxury sedans that have become all the rage with the wealthy, eco-conscious set. The results pushed Tesla shares farther into the stratosphere and boosted its market cap beyond that of Suzuki, Mitsubishi Motors and Isuzu.
Led by CEO Elon Musk, the ten-year-old automaker delivered 5,150 Model S sedans in the last quarter, beating a forecast of 4,500 vehicles. As first reported in our cover story last month, Tesla has ramped production at its Silicon Valley factory up to 500 vehicles a week. (You can see the factory in action here.) It’s also now preparing to ship cars into Europe – Norway alone should account for 800 orders, the company said – and then Asia. Tesla’s revenue for the second quarter reached $405 million, up from $26.7 million in the same quarter last year (shareholder letter in PDF). Excluding one-time items, Tesla posted an operating profit of 20 cents a share, which was a real shocker to the Wall Street analysts that expected a 20 cent per share loss. Including all the special items, Tesla reported a net loss of $30.5 million or a loss of 26 cents per share.
Investors in the after-hours markets drove Tesla shares up more than 12 percent to a 52-week high of $150.90. Tesla started out the year trading at about $33 per share before a string of announcements generated interest in the stock and put the squeeze on short sellers who had bet that the Model S would be a dud.
Tesla kept its sales forecast for the year steady at 21,000 vehicles but declared that it expects to ship 40,000 Model S units per year by late 2014.
