Tesla Stock Gains As Musk Tweets Plaid Coming to China In March

On Nov 22, 2021

Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report shares jumped higher in pre-market trading after founder and CEO Elon Musk said the Model S Plaid, the car-maker’s high performance luxury sedan, will be made available in China early next year.

In a Tweet early Monday, Musk said the Plaid will be coming to China “probably around March”, following its formal launch in September. The Plaid, priced at $140,000, has a charge range of 520 miles and reportedly can reach top speeds of 200 miles per hour.

Tesla sold 54,391 China-made vehicles in the world’s biggest car market last month, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association, just shy of the record total of 56,006 tallied in September.

The Tweet follows a weekend of disruption for some Tesla owners after an app server outage that prevent many from connecting to, or entering, their Tesla vehicles. Musk apologized for the disruption, noting it was linked to “increased verbosity of network traffic.”

Tesla shares were marked 2.8% higher in pre-market trading to indicate an opening bell price of $1,169.50 each.

Tesla posted net income of just over $2 billion for the three months ending in September, alongside the strongest profit margins in the group’s history and record sales of $13.7 billion. The blowout figures followed another all-time high in third quarter deliveries, which rose 73.2% from last year to 241,300 units.

CFO Zach Kirkhorn cautioned that plans to open and ramp-up production at new factories in Germany and Texas, as well as surging input costs and labor shortages, would impact margins in the coming quarters, but the group’s ability to defy the global semiconductor shortage, while weaning its reliance on carbon credit sales to flatter its revenue line, has been truly impressive.