Fahad Saleem
4 min read
In This Article:
Tesla (TSLA) shares are trending as Elon Musk is openly grilling President Donald Trump's tax bill plan. The stock is down 12% this year.
Jeffrey Small from Arbor Financial talked about Tesla (TSLA) during a latest program on Schwab Network. He believes AI and autonomous driving remain the key for Tesla's growth.
"Granted, they're losing money on their cars. That number is growing, but you can't ignore that they are the greatest AI story on the planet. Self-driving robo taxis, if they take hold and he can master that, have an 80% margin in an environment where he can take over the taxi industry. And if that occurs, that's why the price is up. It's going up. It bottomed out at 221 on April 2nd. It's up to 361 today. That's the only reason the stock is going up at this point, because it certainly isn't going up because of the auto business."
Hadrian / Shutterstock.com Tesla’s EV sales are falling all over the world as the company faces challenges from competitors. Even if Elon Musk increases his focus to fix the company’s problems, it would take a lot of effort to come out of the demand crisis. For example, in California, the largest U.S. market for electric vehicle adoption and sales, Tesla sales fell about 12% year over year in 2024, causing its market share to drop from 60.1% in 2023 to 52.5% in 2024. Was it because Californians are buying fewer EVs? No. Californians purchased more than 2 million electric cars during the year, almost double when compared to the past two years.
Loomis Sayles Global Growth Fund stated the following regarding Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:
“Founded in 2003, Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) is a global leader in the design, manufacturing, and sales of high performance fully electric (battery) vehicles (EVs). The company’s automotive unit sells its products directly to customers through its website and retail locations and continues to grow its customer-facing infrastructure through a global network of vehicle service centers, mobile service technicians, body shops, Supercharger stations, and Destination Chargers to accelerate widespread adoption of its products. Tesla also designs, manufactures, sells, and installs solar energy generation and energy storage products to residential, commercial, and industrial clients through its energy generation and storage unit. The company generated approximately 90% of its sales from its automotive segment and 10% from its energy generation and storage segment in its 2024 fiscal year. From a geographic standpoint, the US and China are the company’s two largest markets and accounted for approximately 49% and 21% of 2024 sales, respectively, while the rest of the world collectively accounts for approximately 30%.
