Hitachi Energy is investing $1.5 billion to ramp up transformer production to support electrification efforts worldwide.

Transformers enable efficient transmission and distribution of electricity. They’re a crucial component for integrating renewables, grid interconnections, electrifying transportation, and decarbonizing energy systems.

Hitachi Energy’s latest investment will gradually expand its global transformer capacity by 2027. The $1.5 billion is in addition to the $3 billion the company announced in October 2023 for transformer manufacturing.

Today, the Zurich-headquartered company also announced an investment of around $180 million in a new 30,000-square-meter (322,917-square-foot) transformer factory in the Vaasa region, Finland. It will come online in 2027. 

I asked Hitachi Energy about its US expansion plans, and Steve McKinney, senior VP & head of Hitachi Energy’s transformer business in North America, said:

The investments announced today are part of an overall effort to strengthen and optimize our manufacturing footprint, both globally and within North America.

Hitachi Energy’s transformer facility expansions include the ongoing project in South Boston, Virginia, and other recently completed projects at Jefferson City, Missouri, and Bland, Virginia, among others, and additional projects in the region will be announced soon.

Hitachi Energy is the world’s largest transformer manufacturer in terms of installed base, portfolio range, manufacturing capacity, and market coverage, with over 60 transformer factories and service centers globally.

Based on the transformer data collected, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates distribution transformer capacity may need to increase 160–260% by 2050 compared to 2021 levels to meet residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation energy demands.

Aging transformers and electrification primarily drive the increase in demand.

Read more: Penske and Hitachi just launched a big electric truck charging pilot

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Tesla has teased its upcoming self-driving ride-hailing app, previously called ‘Tesla Network’, that the automaker is positioning as a Uber competitor.

For years now, Tesla has been talking about releasing a ride-hailing app to compete with Uber and now Waymo.

At times, there have been talks about releasing it without self-driving capability, but it is now clear that it is what the automaker is waiting for.

While Tesla has yet to achieve unsupervised self-driving, which would obviously be needed for an autonomous ride-hailing app, recent progress is encouraging the company to start working on that ride-hailing app.

Today, with the release of its Q1 2024 financial results, Tesla has decided to tease its ride-hailing app with some screenshots:

The screenshot shows Uber-like characteristics, but it also includes features unique to self-driving vehicles, like “summoning” the vehicle and adjusting temperature and music directly from the app.

Tesla briefly mentioned its ride-hailing app in its Q1 earnings results:

We have been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service.

And then added:

We are currently working on ride-hailing functionality that will be available in the future. We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.

This confirms that the ride-hailing will not be in a separate app, but instead, it will be directly included in the existing and already popular Tesla app.

The automaker didn’t talk about the timing for the release of its ride-hailing service, which again will be dependent on Tesla achieving unsupervised self-driving – something it has yet to do, but claims to be closer than ever to with the release of its FSD v12 software.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders letter for the first quarter (Q1) 2024 after market close today.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.

Tesla Q1 2024 earnings expectations

As we reported in our Tesla Q1 2024 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $22.220 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.49 per share.

Now, did Tesla meet, beat, or miss the expectations?

Tesla Q1 2024 financial results

Just after the market close today, Tesla released its financial results and confirmed that it did miss expectations with earnings of $0.45 per share (non-GAAP) and revenue with $21,301 billion during the last quarter.

Despite the miss on expectations for revenue and earnings, which are generally the main drivers of stock prices, Tesla’s stock is up by as much as 8% in aftermarket trading following the release of the results.

That’s probably due to Tesla trying to ride the AI wave with news in the release.

For example, the automaker announced that it “increased AI training compute by more than 130% in Q1”, which is impressive considering Tesla already had one of the biggest supercomputers in the world prior to the quarter.

For the first time in a long time, Tesla saw its cash position reduced in Q1, but it still sits on a nice $26.9 billion cash pile:

Quarter-end cash, cash equivalents and investments in Q1 was $26.9B. The sequential decrease of $2.2B was a result of negative free cash flow of $2.5B, driven by an inventory increase of $2.7B and AI infrastructure capex of $1.0B in Q1.

Tesla also announced a change of plan regarding its next-gen vehicles:

We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):

Here’s Tesla’s Q1 2024 shareholder presentation in full:

Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q1 2024 results: