SAN FRANCISCO: Top US electric automaker, Tesla Inc, on Wednesday reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024 with increasing revenue, plummeting net income and shrinking operating margins.
Total revenue in the quarter grew 2 per cent year on year to US$25.7 billion. In 2024, Tesla’s total revenue reached US$97.7 billion, a 1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
Its quarterly net income attributable to common stockholders (GAAP) fell to US$2.3 billion, down 71 per cent year on year. Its yearly net income was US$7.1 billion, a 53 per cent decrease compared to the previous year.
Tesla reported 495,570 vehicle deliveries in the fourth quarter. For the full year of 2024, it delivered 1.79 million vehicles, down 1.1 per cent from 2023, marking the company’s first year-over-year decline in annual vehicle deliveries in more than a decade.
In the fourth quarter, the cost of goods sold (COGS) per vehicle dropped to a record low of under US$35,000, primarily driven by improvements in raw material costs.
The company’s operating income declined by 23 per cent year on year to US$1.6 billion in the fourth quarter, resulting in a 6.2 per cent operating margin. For the full year of 2024, the operating margin stood at 7.2 per cent, the lowest since 2020.
According to the company, it was a record quarter for both vehicle deliveries and energy storage deployments.
“In 2024, we made significant investments in infrastructure that will spur the next wave of growth for the company, including vehicle manufacturing capabilities for new models, AI training compute and energy storage manufacturing capacity,” Tesla noted, adding that construction of Megafactory Shanghai was completed in December and will begin ramping this quarter.
The company expects that 2025 will be a seminal year in Tesla’s history as full self-driving (FSD) (Supervised) continues to rapidly improve with the aim of ultimately exceeding human levels of safety.
“This will eventually unlock an unsupervised FSD option for our customers and the Robotaxi business, which we expect to begin launching later this year in parts of the United States. We also continue to work on launching FSD (Supervised) in Europe and China in 2025,” Tesla said.
— BERNAMA-XINHUA
