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Brand new Tesla vehicles in Great Britain (archive image): strong demand
Photo: Jon Super / AP
Tesla set a record for its deliveries in the past quarter.
The electric car manufacturer brought 308,600 vehicles to customers in the last three months of the year.
In the entire year, Tesla has a good 936,000 deliveries, an increase of 87 percent compared to 2020.
The pioneer in car electrification wants to maintain an annual increase in deliveries of at least 50 percent in the long term.
The new factories in Grünheide near Berlin and in Texas should create the necessary capacities for this.
So far, Tesla has built its vehicles at the main plant in Fremont, California, and at the new plant in Shanghai.
The quarterly record came as a surprise to analysts who had expected 263,000 cars.
In the same quarter of the previous year, Tesla had delivered a good 180,000 vehicles.
Despite the tremendous growth, Tesla is still a lightweight in the automotive market in terms of absolute figures: For example, its rival Volkswagen produced a total of 8.9 million vehicles in 2020 - despite a slump in sales.
But shareholders focus less on the absolute values than on the brilliant growth of the US group. And so the new Tesla numbers on the stock market caused a real price jump. Shortly after the start of trading, Tesla shares soared in US trading by around ten percent to $ 1,164.47 in the meantime. This approached their record high of $ 1,243 in early November.
The company, which is run by US billionaire Elon Musk, was also affected by the chip shortages that troubled many car manufacturers last year. As a result, Tesla also had to cut back production and temporarily stop it. But the electric car maker also found a way to quickly rewrite its software so that it runs on different chips than those previously used. This gave Tesla more choice of components. In the automotive market as a whole, there was only growth in the low single-digit percentage range in the past year, according to analysts.
The Model 3 and Model Y compact cars continue to make up the lion's share of the Tesla business.
Of these, almost 297,000 vehicles were delivered in the final quarter and a good 911,000 throughout the year, as Tesla announced on Sunday.
The more expensive and larger Model S and Model X cars, which were renewed last year, make up the rest.
Tesla postponed the start of production of the »Cybertruck« electric pickup to this year, referring to the bottlenecks in the supply chain.
mic / dpa-afx