Tesla sees 2021 as a "breakthrough year".

In its quarterly report, released after the market closed on Wednesday, the Elon Musk-led company said there should now be no doubt that electric cars can be a profitable business.

This was underlined with a record profit for the quarter and also for the year as a whole.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

  • Follow I follow

The numbers were generally better than analysts had expected.

Nevertheless, the share price was initially slightly negative in the after-hours trading.

The share had already lost more than twenty percent of its value since the beginning of the year in a generally weak stock market environment.

Last fall, Tesla's market capitalization temporarily exceeded the one trillion dollar mark.

The company is currently around $940 billion.

It still remains by far the highest-rated automaker in the world.

Overall, Tesla reported net income of $2.3 billion for the past three months.

The manufacturer thus surpassed its previous record value of 1.6 billion dollars, which it had only achieved in the previous quarter.

In 2021 as a whole, he made a profit of $5.5 billion.

Only the year before he had reported a profit for the first time ever, at that time it was $ 721 million.

87 percent more cars delivered than in 2020

In contrast to a few quarters ago, profits no longer depended so heavily on the highly profitable side business with emission points.

Tesla gets these credits from governments for making electric cars, and then sells them to competitors who help meet government emissions regulations.

Last quarter, that deal was worth $314 million, a very small portion of net income.

It is expected that it will continue to lose importance.

The more other manufacturers release electric cars themselves, the less they need Tesla's certificates.

Last year, Tesla delivered a total of 936,000 cars, an increase of 87 percent compared to 2020. The company, like many of its competitors, suffers from bottlenecks in its supply chain, such as a shortage of semiconductors.

Tesla called this the "principal limiting factor."

Mills have not been able to operate at full capacity for several quarters now, and this is likely to continue in 2022.

Expand production “as fast as we can”

Tesla describes the ability to increase capacity across the entire supply chain as crucial to being competitive in the electric car business.

The focus in the new year will therefore be on expanding production "as quickly as we can".

The new plants in Grünheide in Brandenburg and in Texas in Texas will play a major role in this.

Tesla actually wanted to start production in Grünheide last July.

The company has built cars here for testing purposes, but production hasn't officially started yet.

The final approval for the work is still pending, but this process is apparently in the final phase.

Parallel to Grünheide, Tesla has also built a huge plant in Austin, it is the second production facility on the American home market after the main factory in California.

According to Tesla, the first vehicles were produced here at the end of the year.

Here, too, certification is still necessary before the first cars are delivered to customers.

Tesla is also preparing to expand its product range.

The last new model, the Model Y, came out almost two years ago.

The pick-up van "Cybertruck" is expected next, the production of which was originally supposed to start at the end of 2021.

Now, however, it is not expected to produce larger quantities until 2023.

The "Semi" truck, which was presented in 2017, will probably not be produced until 2023.