Tesla Earnings Call Transcript Q1 2014 – Complete Conference Call

Elon Musk: I mean as…as… I…I would…we’ve…so we’ve…so particularly we are seeing a steadily increasing demand in North America and…and so, yeah.

John D. Lovallo – Merrill Lynch: Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Our next question comes from Rod Lache with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Rod A. Lache – Deutsche Bank Securities: Hey, everybody. Amm, it…it seems like you’re making a lot of progress amm…in terms of purchased material and efficiency. Just looking at the numbers and amm…wha…what I’m looking at is it looks like your product’s gross profit, you reported like a hundred and ninety million last quarter, but there was a gain in there, so maybe it was a hundred and eighty million in Q four and then this quarter you did a hundred and eighty million including a charge. Amm, so it…it seems like your gross profit didn’t move, even though your revenue was down. Amm, I’m just hoping that you can maybe give us a little bit of an update on where…where your incremental margins stand today, just given some of the progress that you’ve made. And in a steady-state basis, amm…these incremental units, what kind of conversion for incremental volume do you…do you achieve today amm…on the gross profit line?

Jeffrey B. Straubel: Rod I’m not exactly clear what your question is, but I think to broader point aaa…there is aaa…gross margin improvement that’s happening because of the cost improvements that we continue to achieve and this is the internal road map that we have on a variety of actions aaa…to achieve material cost reduction some internally, some at our suppliers, some through design and those actions will continue throughout the year and that’s why we feel comfortable that we will achieve aaa…twenty eight percent gross margin by Q four.

Elon Musk: Yeah, there is I think a couple of important points aaa…I would like to make here which is fir…first of all, amm…aaa…aaa…overall like we…we…we don’t…we don’t do any cost down if it makes the product worse. So that doesn’t really gain us anything which is as quite tempting do that sometime and that drives me crazy when companies and other, you know, elsewhere in the car industry or other industries reduced cost by reducing values. That’s not a good think amm…so we…we…our cost productions are really in that aaa…like figuring out how to get the molecules in the right shape amm…in a smarter way amm…as I appose to trying to sort of strip value out, in fact in number of case we’ve actually added cost to the car, because there is something that needed to be aaa…improved, you know the under-body shield is an example of that.

Amm, and our gross margin in Q one will be – and we have a number of sort of charges against – that…that negatively affected gross margin, would have been a little bit higher if it hadn’t been for things like, for example, the under-body shield activity. Amm, aaa…I think…I think it’s…we feel fairly comfortable of achieving the twenty eight percent gross margin by the end of the year on the Model S front.

Rod A. Lache – Deutsche Bank Securities: Okay, thanks. And amm…you indicated at aaa…again, in your release six hundred and fifty to eight hundred and fifty of CapEx this year. Can you give us some…some high-level thoughts on amm…preliminarily what next year might look like as you’re starting to ramp up the…the gigafactory, and also, I…I know that you made some reference to SG and A and R and D as a percentage of sales, but I guess for your stage of…of development, I’m not sure that that’s really applicable. Can you give us an idea of amm…you know, how that might look on…on an absolute basis?

Jeffrey B. Straubel: Rod, it’s a bit too early for us to give amm…their guidance, our thoughts on twenty fifteen aaa…CapEx, amm…clearly twenty fifteen at a high level will be dominated by spending on the gigafactory aaa…as well as we start to prepare for Gen three. Amm, I think much of Model S and Model X amm…amm…spending will be behind us, there will be some aaa…lagging Model X spending aaa…from a CapEx perspective, just before launch from a tooling and an equipment perspective.

So there will be a small change or there will be a change in the categorization of spending. Aaa, and then beyond that, clearly we will continue to expand rapidly, glo…aaa…globally with our store service centers and Superchargers, so that growth will continue, but I think aaa…we can provide you a bit more clarity on that, perhaps a couple of quarters from now.