Tesla Still Saw Profit Loss In Q1, But Beat Wall Street Expectations

@grg / 1:47 pm PDT • May 6, 2015

Wall Street didn’t have the highest expectations for Tesla this quarter, but the company actually did quite a bit better than was expected.

It was predicted that Tesla would lose about 50 cents per share; instead, they lost 36 cents. It’s still a loss, of course — but the news of the beat has Tesla stock up by about 4% at the time of publishing.

This story is developing, as the investor earnings call hasn’t happened yet and that tends to hold a few details that the text reports don’t.

Here’s some of what we’ve gleaned from their Q1 results so far:

The company sold 10,045 Model S this quarter, juuuust surpassing the 10,030 car estimate they disclosed a few weeks back. .
They’re aiming to deliver 55,000 cars this year in all, versus roughly 33,000 in 2014
Revenue for the quarter was expected to come in at around $1.04 billion; in reality, it came in at $1.10 billion.
While they don’t get specific about numbers, they’re ramping up Model S 85D production.
The Model X (Tesla’s work-in-progress electric SUV) has reached release candidate prototype stage — meaning they’re not changing much about it from this point on, unless somethings broken.