Palo Alto (dpa) - The US electric car maker Tesla has achieved another quarterly profit despite the strains caused by the corona pandemic.
The bottom line was a surplus of $ 104 million (90 million euros) in the three months to the end of June, as the tech billionaire Elon Musk announced after the US market closed. There had been a high loss in the previous year.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the renewed corona escalation in the United States, Tesla continues to pursue its ambitious goal of delivering over 500,000 cars in 2020. The capacity is available, but it is difficult to foresee whether there will be further production disruptions. The annual forecast can therefore be adjusted if necessary.
In a conference call after the balance sheet, Musk also confirmed that Tesla's second US auto plant will be built next to the main plant in Fremont, California, Texas, near the city of Austin. "We're going to build a stunning factory right on the Colorado River," Musk said. The construction of Tesla's first European plant in Grünheide near Berlin is also progressing very well.
With the renewed quarterly profit, Tesla reached a milestone - for the first time since its foundation in 2003, the company was in the black for twelve months. Given the lost production and lost sales in the Corona crisis, this is a particularly great success, even though total revenue fell about five percent year-over-year to $ 6.0 billion.
Tesla's quarterly figures clearly exceeded analysts' expectations, and the stock rose significantly after the exchange. This year, Musk's company is already the high-flyer with a share price increase of around 280 percent. The stock market value recently even shot well above the $ 300 billion mark, which means Tesla is trading higher than all other automakers.
The fact that the pioneer of the electric car from Silicon Valley, the stronghold of technology, is better able to cope with the corona pandemic than the competition has already been shown by the delivery figures for the second quarter published in early July. While the car market had to cope with a sharp drop in sales overall, thanks to the strong demand for its 3 and Y models, Tesla's customer base of just under 91,000 vehicles was just five percent less than in the same period last year.
It was already foreseeable in June that Texas would be awarded the contract to choose the location for Tesla's second US auto plant when the local traveller, Travis County, published concrete plans for the construction. The investment volume will, according to the information, amount to over a billion dollars, around 5000 jobs are to be created. Now Musk revealed that in addition to Model 3 and Model Y, the electric pick-up Cybertruck and the semi-trailer are to be manufactured there.
So far, Tesla has only one automobile factory in Fremont in the United States. Another car plant was opened in Shanghai, one is being built in Grünheide near Berlin. In addition to the car plants, Tesla also operates a battery plant in Nevada and a factory in New York, which mainly produces solar systems. In view of the great demand, in particular for the new Model Y, new production facilities have to be built quickly.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 200723-99-891466 / 2
