Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Must Raise Billions To Meet Musk Dreams
$TSLA
Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) has to raise Billions by selling stock to meet Elon Musk’s production plans.
The Big Q: Will the benefits will be enough to outweigh the dilution of the falling share price.
When CEO Elon Musk drove the EV company’s target ahead to increase vehicle assembly to 500,000 a year to Y 2018 from Y 2020, he added that capital spending will increase by about 50% or $750-M from the original budget for this year, which requires fundraising.
Notably, the fledgling EV company faces huge capital expenditures (billions) as it ramps up its massive battery factory toward full production, adds tooling for a 3rd model, expands sales and service operations globally, seeks to hire additional manufacturing experts (the top people have already ankled) and contemplates adding more vehicle-assembly capacity.
Not to mention finding buyers in a demographic that has no money to buy his dream machines.
A Barclays analyst projects a $3-B equity raise sometime in Q-2. At current stock prices, a transaction of that size would be about 14.5-M shares, an increase of 11% to the number of shares outstanding now.
This would be Tesla’s 6th capital raise in the last 4 years, following its June 2010 IPO, when it raised $226-M, Mr. Musk the largest shareholder with a 22% stake.
With the Q-1 earnings release last week, Tesla said it had $1.44-B in cash and cash equivalents as of 31 March, up from $1.19-B 3 months earlier. Long-term debt rose to $3.12-B from $2.65-B at year-end.
Most of the cash generated via orders placed for the Model 3 came in after the Quarter closed, that money is not ideal for capital investments as it is refundable on demand.
“The significant acceleration of capacity and assembly plans of course necessitates a large increase in capital spending, providing perfect rationale for a large equity capital raise which might have otherwise been needed or at any rate desired, due to ongoing free cash burn and liquidity-comfort levels,” wrote Ryan Brinkman of JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Elon Musk is challenged in here and no amount of bravado will solve his billion dollar problems.
| Symbol | Last Trade | Date | Change | Open | High | Low | Volume |
| NASDAQ:TSLA | 207.61 | 13 May-2016 | 0.33 | 207.78 | 211.2 | 206.7 | 2,819,900 |
| HeffX-LTN Analysis for TSLA: | Overall | Short | Intermediate | Long |
| Neutral (-0.24) | Bearish (-0.33) | Bearish (-0.27) | Neutral (-0.11) |
Note: My 3 Key technical indicators are flashing Very Bearish
Have a terrific weekend.
Paul Ebeling
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