The electric vehicle maker also sold a chunk of its Bitcoin holdings, the company said on Wednesday, as its bet on the cryptocurrency weakened. Tesla’s revenue fell 9% between the second and first quarter to $16.9bn (£14.1bn), although it was still 42% higher than last year. Its revenue fell from a record three-month revenue of $18.8 billion it posted earlier this year amid supply chain problems and a factory shutdown in China due to Covid restrictions. Telsa said it “faced some challenges, including limited production and outages in Shanghai for most of the quarter,” but claimed it “continued to make significant progress across the business in the second quarter of 2022.” Earlier this month, Tesla reported that it had delivered more than 254,000 electric vehicles, up from about 300,000 in the previous quarter. Tesla’s factory in Shanghai has been closed for nearly two months due to China’s ongoing coronavirus restrictions as the company grappled with a series of supply chain issues. However, the electric car maker added that it had had a record month at its Fremont plant and produced 1,000 vehicles in one week from its Berlin Gigafactory. The company said it posted an operating profit of $2.5 billion in the quarter ended in June. Shares rose 4% in after-hours trading in New York after it promised a “record-breaking second half of 2022.” Tesla shares have fallen about 40% so far this year, with the technology sell-off wiping hundreds of millions of dollars off the value of the electric car maker, despite posting record results in April. It is currently worth around $770 billion. However, the electric car maker has remained dominant in the US and has bucked the trend of declining car sales at rival manufacturers. Incumbents such as Volkswagen have seen their sales fall to 10-year lows due to the semiconductor supply chain crisis. Sales at Ford fell 17% earlier this year. BMW sales fell 20% in its latest set of results. Emerging Chinese players such as BYD have proved more demanding. BYD topped Tesla’s electric car sales earlier in July. Its latest results also appeared to signal the end of Mr. Musk’s love affair with Bitcoin. Tesla said it had suffered a Bitcoin stockpile and sold 75% of its cryptocurrency for $936 million in cash. In early 2021, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoins, buying about $36,000 worth of the coins at the time. The price of Bitcoin has fallen this year and was worth around $19,000 at the end of June, at the end of Tesla’s financial period. Musk has been outspoken about his fears about the wider economy, warning in June that he had a “super bad feeling about the economy”. He also called the company’s plants in Texas and Berlin “giant money furnaces” burning billions of dollars. Tesla’s chief executive has unveiled plans to cut Tesla’s workforce by 10%, calling the downturn “inevitable”. Other electric vehicle competitors have been forced to cut jobs. Arrival, a British electric van company, said it was cutting 800 jobs, while US electric vehicle maker Rivian plans to cut hundreds of jobs after its share price collapsed 70% this year. Despite the slump in electric vehicle stocks, Tesla remains the darling of retail investors who have flocked to Mr. Musk’s company. Its valuation has also been boosted in part by its efforts in automated driving. These were dealt a blow this month by the departure of Autopilot chief Andrej Karpathy. The electric car maker behind the Model 3 and Model Y has already raised the price of its electric vehicles as inflation soars. Tesla’s share price was also weighed down by Mr Musk’s bold $44 billion takeover bid for Twitter, which turned into a legal battle after the Tesla boss tried to back out of the deal. The acquisition has drawn comparisons to Mr. Musk’s last bold foray into mergers and acquisitions, in which he tried to take Tesla private for $420 a share in 2018. Twitter is now trying to force Musk to go ahead with the acquisition, which was to be financed largely by Tesla stock sales. On Tuesday, Twitter won the first phase of its legal battle against Musk, forcing an expedited trial until October. Musk’s legal team has been trying to delay any trial until 2023. The billionaire maintains that Twitter has not been open about the number of “bots” or spam accounts on the social network. He is using this as an excuse to cut off the merger agreement. Twitter, however, argues that Mr. Musk should be forced to buy Twitter and cannot back out.
