Tesla shares tumble after electric vehicle company misses delivery target

Shares of Tesla have tumbled more than 12% on the first full day of trading since the company announced 2022 delivery numbers that fell short of targets.

The electric vehicle and solar panel maker’s stock closed at 108.10 dollars, and it is down just under 70% since the start of last year.

The stock hit its lowest point since August 2020, and Tesla’s market value, according to FactSet, slid to 341 billion US dollars (£284 billion), down from over one trillion dollars as recently as April.

Tesla said on Monday that it sold a record 1.3 million vehicles last year, but the number fell short of chief executive Elon Musk’s pledge to grow deliveries by 50% nearly every year.

The 2022 figure topped the prior record of 936,000 vehicles delivered in 2021, but it was shy of the 1.4 million needed to reach the company’s 50% growth target.

Sales grew 40% year over year, while production climbed 47% to 1.37 million.

The shortfall came despite a major year-end sales push that included rare 7,500 dollar (£6,260) discounts in the US on the Models Y and 3, the company’s top-selling models.

Analysts said that Tesla also offered discounts in China, leading some to question whether demand for the company’s vehicles is softening.

Tesla, based in Austin, Texas, also had to deal with rising cases of novel coronavirus in China, which hampered production at its Shanghai factory.

Cowen and Co analyst Jeffrey Osborne expected investors to focus on missing the delivery target, but he only saw modest negative reaction “following acute weakness the past few weeks on production cuts in China and discounting”.

Investors will need to see stability in profit margins despite lower prices, and demand and order trends showing resumed growth this year for the stock to get further support, Mr Osborne wrote in a note to investors early on Tuesday.

In an apparent effort to shore up the stock price, Tesla announced on Monday that it would hold an investor day event on March 1 at its factory near Austin.

Investors will be able to see Tesla’s production line, discuss expansion plans and see the platform that will go beneath Tesla’s next generation of vehicles.

The Tesla stock decline has also cost Mr Musk billions, bumping him out of the top spot for the world’s wealthiest person, according to Forbes.

Also playing into the stock drop is Mr Musk’s 44 billion dollar (£36.7 billion) purchase of Twitter and his sale of Tesla stock to help fund the purchase.

Mr Musk sold another 2.58 billion dollars (£2.15 billion) worth of Tesla stock last month and has sold nearly 23 billion dollars (£19 billion) worth of his car company’s shares since April, when he started building a position in Twitter.

Many investors are worried that Mr Musk has become too distracted as chief executive of Twitter and is not paying enough attention to the electric vehicle company.

Mr Musk has said he would step down as Twitter chief executive when he finds someone to run the social media platform.