Thread by @fly4dat

1/ Why did Sasha Zahnd, European🇪🇺 sales head of $TSLA quit #Tesla, after less than half a year? His predecessor, Jan Oehmicke (telling name!) fared twice as better: he quit after a full year

Word is that both top managers had disagreements with Musk. What could that be?

$TSLAQ

2/ Of course, we don't know. But we can guess.

Tesla has sent 7 ships to Europe in Q1, after 8 in 19Q4. Despite all those cars available, #Tesla has only delivered less 2/3 of the cars in Q1 compared to Q4. If my math serves me right, 2/3 << 7/8.

3/ Why so few in Q1 if cars were available, and demand is still through the roof, justifying the sky-high market cap? Well, blame scapeCovid. It worked: the market gave Tesla a pass for Q1.

4/ So what happened to the cars on those ships from Q1? There are two possible answers: a) there have been much less per ship as previously, b) there are lots of cars in inventory.

Rule of thumb worked well in whole 2019: there are ~4,050-4,100 cars per ship.

5/ It's not economical to ship fewer per ship, as the marginal cost of an extra car on a ship is negligible. You want to load the ships to full, or shipping costs bite heavily into gross margins (if anyone still reads and cares about gross margins).

6/ We can, therefore, safely assume that ~28.5-28.7k cars have been shipped in Q1, 24k have been sold, and they must have had at least 3k opening inventory (Jan and first half of Feb deliveries). That means that Tesla must have ended Q1 with 7k+ cars. That's Q2 opening inventory.

7/ 3k have been delivered in April. Then deliveries fell off a cliff. Why?

In Norway, there is little to no inventory now. Other markets continuously get small batches. Why don't they deliver all the cars if there is unlimited demand?

8/ First, there is no unlimited demand. In fact, demand looks quite tepid (#nodemand for my bullish readers, just food for mocking). Second, demand is some markets, especially Norway and the Netherlands can't be *this* low.

9/ My theory: Musk wants to kitchen sink Q2, blame it on C19, get a CovidPass on Q2, artificially create a backlog, inflate Q3 deliveries to show normal or even high demand, ship MY, and win half a year more until real demand shows, and pray/dump prices to sell more in Q4.

10/ If he manages, 21Q1 will again be "seasonally weak", and he just won another year. At least in Europe.

US seems to be pretty constant (ex-corona).

Again, the whole charade comes down to China. Who knows what one can do in China if he has the support of the CCP.