Electric car manufacturer Tesla has reached a milestone: For the first time, Elon Musk’s company achieved more than a billion dollars in profit in one quarter. The hopes for the further growth story also rest on the factory in Grünheide.
For years, the electric car pioneer Tesla burned a lot of money, now Elon Musk is delivering one record result after the next. In the second quarter just ended, the US company achieved more than a billion dollars in profit for the first time, as the group announced in Palo Alto on Monday evening.
The record profit of 1.1 billion dollars (0.9 billion euros) is also remarkable because the surplus has increased tenfold within one year. Revenues grew 98 percent to $ 12 billion over the same period. The numbers were thus above those expected by analysts.
Tesla also achieved new records in production. In the three months of the second quarter, more than 200,000 Tesla cars were built and delivered. And this in spite of the scarcity of raw materials, especially in the case of semiconductors, which Tesla is facing. How well the supply of parts works will have a major impact on how much production can be increased in the rest of the year.
Lucrative certificate trading
However, part of the profit comes only indirectly from the sale of cars. As in the past, Tesla benefits greatly from trading emissions certificates in the USA and Europe. Competitors, whose cars blow a lot of emissions into the air, have to buy them. Tesla, on the other hand, can sell them with its pure e-car fleet. In the second quarter, Tesla earned $ 354 million from the certificates. This means that around a third of the profit was attributable to certificate trading, although the dependency on certificates was even higher in the past.
Another side business, however, contributed nothing to the profit this time. In the previous quarter, Tesla’s spectacular investment in Bitcoins had resulted in special proceeds of $ 100 million. In the meantime, the bitcoins have lost value again, so that the company has to write off $ 23 million on them.
Hope for a new gigafactory
Tesla also comments on the Gigafactory under construction in Berlin-Grünheide in the quarterly report. This is needed to meet the demand in Europe, because the waiting times for customers are already increasing, writes Tesla. The plan is to build the first Model Y in the new plant in Germany and another in Texas in 2021. In order to underpin the optimism, a few nice pictures of the construction progress are enclosed with the release of the quarterly figures.
In Brandenburg, however, Tesla is still only building with a provisional building permit because environmental issues have not yet been conclusively answered. Most recently, Tesla itself delayed the process because an application for battery cell production was submitted in addition to the car factory. A final approval for Tesla by the authorities in Brandenburg is not expected until the fourth quarter.
Sources: / DPA
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Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
