As shares of Tesla recovered during Monday's after-hours trading, the dynamics have now totally disconnected from the market value of the company's stock once again.
Apparently hopes of new measures from central banks bear more weight than selling electric cars. Also, Wedbush analysts on Monday included Tesla in its list of "golden opportunity" stocks, clearly without the support of a price chart, since the stock's close Friday, was twice its level in December last year.
Tesla has had a shaky couple of months in two European markets that its top honcho, Elon Musk, was counting on for sales in 2019. The US electric car manufacturer registered only 83 new vehicles in Norway in February, compared with 1,016 cars in the same period last year, based on figures from the country's transport agencies. In the Netherlands, car registrations were down 69 percent to 155 units.
The figures represent a dark sign for two of just four territories for which the company breaks out profits on a three-month basis. Registrations in the Netherlands and Norway in the first two months of 2020 dropped 78 percent and 43 percent, respectively. And this is against a brittle year-ago comparison -- sales of the Model 3 were only getting rolled off in the first months of last year and did not increase until later in the year.
While these regions are not that big, the Netherlands is home to the US carmaker's European distribution hub, and represented 8.2 percent of Tesla's global orders last year, and even represented a large enough percentage of the company's sales in 2019.
Sales from Norway and the Netherlands jumped 66 percent and 49 percent in 2019, helping balance a 15 percent plunge in the US -- by far Tesla's biggest market. Germany will be a major market as well to monitor this year after the launch of a landmark climate-linked stimulus measure with subsidies aimed at lifting electric-car profits.
In China, Tesla had registered only 3,563 cars in January despite the huge hype over the unveiling of the locally-manufactured Model 3. With China's economy hitting a near dead-stop in manufacturing activity in February, analysts are not sure Tesla even sold 1,500 cars in China for the month.
Based on insurance statistics, Tesla registered more than 42,000 cars in China in 2019, making the company way short of the 3,750 a month it would require to register to meet its quota.
Meanwhile, bullish analysts had pegged their projections for 125,000-150,000 Tesla cars sold in China this year, but some analysts expect 80,000 deliveries outside North America and Europe in the coming months, as the coronavirus makes that projection seem overly optimistic.
