Lezen traders zoiets niet?
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/08/...se-of-credits/
awel ik heb het net gelezen en ben geen trader. Lol.
Ff plakken want het zit achter een muurtje:
Tesla: a strange case of credits [Update]
AUGUST 6, 2018 By: Jamie Powell
Tesla's 10-Q, its quarterly filing with the SEC, was released Monday morning. Planning to save it for a deeper read for later in the day, a quick scan of the document led to a surprise that the company had reported a $54m contribution to automotive revenues from regulatory credits.
Surprise, because the electric car company had disclosed in last week's earnings press release that it had not sold any Zero Emission Vehicle Credits in the quarter: “there were no ZEV credit sales in Q2 as compared to $50 million in Q1”.
ZEV credits are state incentives designed to push automakers to create electric cars. In California, and other states, automakers have to earn them to partially offset sales of internal combustion engine cars. Tesla, having generated a surplus of credits over the years, frequently sells them to other manufacturers who need to hit their quotas.
Such sales are essentially pure (gross) profit, leading to a focus on their impact as the company attempts to become consistently profitable.
Here is the relevant table from the press release, which shows the effect of the credits and stock based compensation on automotive gross margins. Note the dash for the second quarter:
However on page 15 of the quarterly SEC filing, under the heading “Revenue by source”, Tesla disclosed $54m of “automotive regulatory credits” in the period:
The total for “automotive regulatory credits” sold so far in 2018 is listed in the SEC filing as $134m.
Checking this against what Tesla said in the first quarter highlights a similar variance between the company's press release and 10-Q for that period as well. The earnings press release said “ZEV credit sales in Q1 2018 were $50m”. The regulatory filing published a few days later said the figure for automotive regulatory credits was $80.3m.
Tesla hasn't previously broken out the figures in its quarterly reporting, but its most recent annual filing, the 2017 10-K reported $360.3m sales of regulatory credits versus $280m of ZEV credit sales for the year in the Q4 press release.
So it appears that there are substantial regulatory credits within automotive revenue, aside from the ZEV credits: $80m last year, and $84m in the first six months of 2018. The total may reflect other emission-related credits, including federal ones related to greenhouse gases.
What seems strange is to draw investors attention to the ZEV credits, excluding these credits from the adjusted gross margin figure, but not the unspecified credits. “Automotive regulatory credits” income is included in Tesla's “total automotive revenues” line in both quarters. After all, the number is seemingly there to give investors a sense of the underlying economics of Tesla's growing car business.
Tesla had not responded to a request for comment at
pixel.*
If one was to include the extra $54m of credits this quarter in the calculation, Tesla's adjusted automotive gross margin would've been 1.6 percentage points lower, at 19.4 per cent versus 21 per cent. In Q1, 1.5 percentage points lower at 17.3 per cent.
As Tesla's real gross margin figure is critical to its future profitability, and has been the subject of much online debate, this disclosure disparity only raises further questions about the reporting of this critical metric.
*Update:
A Tesla spokesperson told us that unlike other regulatory credits, ZEV credit sales can vary heavily from quarter to quarter. So as part of its press releases, Tesla began excluding ZEV credits from the non-GAAP automotive gross margin calculation several years ago. In doing so it believes it allows the true trends in the business to be observed without the noise of ZEV credits.