Shares would be trading higher but late in the conference call last night, CEO Elon Musk announced that current CFO Deepak Ahuja would be retiring for a second time. The financial keys will be handed to 9 year veteran Zach Kirkhorn. This news is pretty boring because they hired a veteran inside the company and most shareholders knew Deepak would retire again at some point. TSLA shares would be down a lot if they were actively seeking to hire someone from outside. Mr. Kirkhorn has been on the team for awhile and has a keen sense of the demands of Elon Musk.
As for the earnings report itself, they improved cash on hand by nearly $700 million which was the key metric I always look at. Tesla will have a large debt payment due in March and the growth in cash on hand will pay for this.
Its clear that Tesla (TSLA) plans to be profitable every quarter from here on out and they have a great product road map. The Model Y will start to be produced on a small scale by 2020 and the Chinese Gigafactory will be producing Model 3 vehicles by year-end as well. Even if we see a recession that may or may not come, Tesla is ready for it.
I strongly feel that later in 2019, we will see one of those straight-up bull runs into the low to mid $400's. Besides TNA, TSLA is my favorite stock at the current share price.
