According to media reports on February 6, German business daily Handelsblatt reported that IT giant SAP has removed Tesla from its list of car suppliers. Steffen Krautwasser, head of SAP's fleet, said Tesla's price volatility makes planning more difficult and carries higher risks. The report quoted the German company as saying that Tesla often delivers earlier than agreed, which has caused problems for SAP as a customer. (SAP currently has a total of 29,000 vehicles, and the report did not specify how many of them are Tesla vehicles.)

Although the overall number is not large, SAP's withdrawal means that Musk's efforts to expand the corporate car market have suffered a setback, which is undoubtedly worse in the context of the already low market sentiment since the beginning of the year. Tesla's frequent price adjustments for its cars are well known. Just over the past weekend, according to Tesla's website, the company raised the price of the long-range Model 3 by $1,000 to $46,990, up from $45,990 previously.

After the news that SAP had excluded Tesla from its list of car suppliers, Tesla's U.S. stock price plunged as much as 7% in the intraday trading, bringing its cumulative decline in the past five trading days to over 10%, and its decline since the beginning of the year has reached an astonishing 30% in just over a month (market value evaporated by $213.395 billion, equivalent to about 1.54 trillion yuan).

However, Tesla's intraday loss shrinked later, but its performance was still significantly worse than the broader U.S. stock market.

Now, Tesla has seen its first annual profit decline since 2017.

According to Tesla's 2023 financial report released recently, Tesla's total operating revenue in 2023 was US$96.773 billion, a year-on-year increase of 18.79%; net profit attributable to common shareholders was US$14.997 billion. The company's gross profit margin for the full year was 18.2%, a year-on-year decrease of 7.35 percentage points.

From the perspective of financial fundamentals, Tesla seems to have delivered a relatively objective performance report with its on-target sales target and record-high revenue performance. However, in fact, potential factors such as slowing revenue growth and growth profit margin are also truly reflected in its stock price. On the day after the financial report was released, January 25 (local time), Tesla fell as much as 12%, and its market value evaporated by $80.1 billion.

At the expense of profits, Tesla ensured its sales volume in 2023. But for this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is obviously somewhat pessimistic. At the earnings conference, he said that Tesla's sales growth in 2024 "may be significantly lower than in 2023," citing the company's focus on launching the next-generation model, which is expected to go into production in the second half of 2025.

According to a report by STCN on January 30, it is learned that in the past year, car companies including BYD, Jikr and Xiaopeng have focused on the pure electric market of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan, and Tesla is facing strong competition from latecomers. On the earnings call, Musk said that Chinese car companies are the most competitive manufacturers in the world. "Without trade restrictions, Chinese car companies can beat most car companies in the world."

Many people believe that Tesla, with its strong brand appeal and product potential, will still be the leader in the electric vehicle industry. However, as the first-mover advantage gradually fades, Tesla’s growth rate will slow down. The next challenges for Tesla are to figure out how much extra sales volume it can gain by lowering prices and how to improve its gross margin by reducing costs.

Tesla compares its current stage to the gap between two growth waves. The first wave was led by the global expansion of the Model 3 and Model Y platforms. The next wave will be driven by the global expansion of the next-generation vehicle platform. In the context of the current slowdown, new vehicle launches, energy business, and autonomous driving are seen as the key drivers of Tesla’s growth in the next few years.

“There is not much new story to tell about Tesla in 2024.” Gao Chao, a researcher at the China Autonomous Driving Industry Innovation Alliance, believes that considering Tesla’s new vehicles are unlikely to be launched in the short term, the old models have reached the ceiling of their bonus period, and Cybertruck is still climbing uphill, Tesla’s sales growth rate in 2024 may not exceed 20%. This result may slow down the company’s previous plan of achieving an annual sales growth of 50% and a sales volume of 20 million units by 2030.