By Al Edwards

American electric vehicle maker Tesla, where Elon Musk serves as CEO, pulled in a whopping US$8.8 billion in revenue for the September quarter.

While sales of vehicles all over the world have fallen due to the impact of the COVID-19 virus, Tesla has seen a 45 per cent increase in deliveries for the quarter under review.
 
Net income came in at US$331 million, equating to 27 cents a share. This performance went well above analysts expectations as Tesla continues its quest to become the world’s leading clean fuel vehicle maker.

This now spells the fifth straight profitable quarter and, as the Chinese economy roars back, registering growth of five per cent for the same quarter, that market has proven lucrative for the American company. Greater performances are no doubt expected when both the U.S. and Europe economies regain momentum.

Tesla is now working on manufacturing a pickup truck to take on the Ford-150. It’s Model 3 is growing in popularity across the world. For the September quarter, Tesla delivered 139,000 vehicles.

“The third quarter of 2020 was a record quarter on many levels. Over the past four quarters we generated over US$1.9 billion of free cash flow while spending over $2.4 billion on new production capacity service centres, supercharging locations and other capital investments. While we took additional SBC expense in Q3, our GAAP operating margin reached 9.2 per cent,” Tesla wrote in its letter to shareholders.

The company earned an adjusted $0.76 per share on its revenues for the three months ended September 31.

Tesla says it continues to see growing interest in its cars, storage and solar products and remains focused on cost-efficiency while growing capacity as quickly as possible. It plans to reach 500,000 deliveries this year.

Of this performance Elon Musk said: “Q3 was our best quarter in history. We achieved record production deliveries, record revenue, record net income, both on GAAP and off GAAP, and record free cash flow of US$1.4 billion. This is really due to the amazing execution of the Tesla team. I could not be more proud to work with such a great group of people.”