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Tesla just published its fourth-quarter vehicle production and delivery report for 2022.

Here are the key numbers.

Total deliveries Q4 2022: 405,278
Total production Q4 2022: 439,701
Total annual deliveries 2022: 1.31 million
Total annual production 2022: 1.37 million

Deliveries are the closest approximation of sales disclosed by Tesla. These numbers represented a new record for the Elon Musk-led automaker and growth of 40% in deliveries year-over-year.

However, the fourth quarter numbers fell shy of analysts’ expectations.

According to a consensus of analysts’ estimates compiled by FactSet, as of Dec. 31, 2022 Wall Street was expecting Tesla to report deliveries around 427,000 for the final quarter of the year. Estimates updated in December, and included in the FactSet consensus, ranged from 409,000 to 433,000.

Those more recent estimates were in line with a company-compiled consensus distributed by Tesla investor relations Vice President Martin Viecha. That consensus, published by electric vehicle industry researcher @TroyTeslike, said that 24 sell-side analysts expected Tesla deliveries of about 417,957 on average for the quarter (and about 1.33 million deliveries for the full year).

Tesla started production at two new factories this year — in Austin, Texas and Brandenburg, Germany — and ramped up production in Fremont, California and in Shanghai, but it does not disclose production and delivery numbers by region.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, Tesla said deliveries of its entry level Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover amounted to 325,158, while deliveries of its higher end Model S sedan and Model X SUV amounted to 18,672.

In its third-quarter shareholder presentation, Tesla wrote: “Over a multi-year horizon we expect to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries. The rate of growth will depend on our equipment capacity, factory uptime, operational efficiency and the capacity and stability of the supply chain.”

The period ending Dec. 31, 2022 was marked by challenges for Tesla, including Covid outbreaks in China, which caused the company to temporarily suspend and reduce production at its Shanghai factory.

During the fourth quarter, Tesla also offered steep price cuts and other promotions in the U.S., China and elsewhere in order to spur demand, even though doing so could put pressure on its margins.

In a recent e-mail to Tesla staff, Elon Musk asked employees to “volunteer” to deliver as many cars to customers as possible before the end of 2022. In his e-mail, Musk also encouraged employees not to be “bothered” by what he characterized as “stock market craziness.”

Shares of Tesla plunged by more than 45% over the last six months.

In December, several analysts expressed concern about weakening demand for Tesla electric vehicles, which are relatively expensive compared with an increasing number of hybrid and fully electric products from competitors.

Along with competitors ranging from industry veterans Ford and GM to upstart Rivian, Tesla is poised to reap the benefits of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act this year, which includes incentives for domestic production and purchases of fully electric cars.

Retail shareholders and analysts alike attributed some of Tesla’s falling share price in 2022 to a so-called “Twitter overhang.”

Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings last year to finance a leveraged buyout of the social media business Twitter. That deal closed in late October. Musk appointed himself CEO of Twitter and has stirred controversy by making sweeping changes to the company and its social media platform.

Shares of Tesla started to rise again in the final days of December 2022, in anticipation of record fourth-quarter and full-year deliveries.

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Apple’s services unit is now a $100 billion a year juggernaut after ‘phenomenal’ growth

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Apple's services unit is now a 0 billion a year juggernaut after 'phenomenal' growth

Apple CEO Tim Cook (C) joins customers during Apple’s iPhone 16 launch in New York on September 20, 2024. 

Timothy A. Clary | Afp | Getty Images

Apple’s second-largest division after the iPhone has turned into a $100 billion a year business that Wall Street loves.

In Apple’s earnings report on Thursday, the company said it reached just under $25 billion in services revenue, an all-time high for the category, and 12% growth on an annual basis.

“It’s an important milestone,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on a call with analysts. “We’ve got to a run rate of $100 billion. You look back just a few years ago and the the growth has been phenomenal.”

Apple first broke out its services revenue in the December quarter of 2014. At the time, it was $4.8 billion.

Apple’s services unit has become a critical part of Apple’s appeal to investors over the past decade. Its gross margin was 74% in the September quarter compared to Apple’s overall margin of 46.2%.

Services contains a wide range of different offerings. According to the company’s SEC filings, it includes advertising, search licensing revenue from Google, warranties called AppleCare, cloud subscription services such as iCloud, content subscriptions such as the company’s Apple TV+ service, and payments from Apple Pay and AppleCare.

On a January 2016 earnings call, when the reporting segment was relatively new, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors to pay attention.

“I do think that the assets that we have in this area are huge, and I do think that it’s probably something that the investment community would want to and should focus more on,” Cook said.

Over the years, Apple has compared its services business to the size of Fortune 500 companies, which are ranked by sales, to give a sense of its scale. After Thursday, Apple’s services business alone, based on its most recent run rate, would land around 40th on the Fortune 500, topping Morgan Stanley and Johnson & Johnson.

Services appeals to investors because many of the subscriptions contained in it are billed on a recurring basis. That can be more reliably modeled than hardware sales, which will increase or decrease based on a given iPhone model’s demand.

“Yes, the the recurring portion is growing faster than the transactional one,” Maestri said on Thursday.

Apple’s fourth-quarter results beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and earnings on Thursday, but net income slumped after a one-time charge as part of a tax decision in Europe. The stock fell as much as 2% in extended trading.  

Apple boasts to investors that its sales from Services will grow alongside its installed base. After someone buys an iPhone, they’re likely to sign up for Apple’s subscriptions, use Safari to search Google, or buy an extended warranty.

Apple also cites a “subscription” figure that includes both its first-party services, such as Apple TV+ subscriptions, and users who sign up to be billed by an App Store app on a recurring basis.

The company said the installed base and subscriptions hit all-time-highs, but didn’t give updated figures. Apple said it had 2.2 billion active devices in February, and in August said it had topped 1 billion paid subscriptions.

Still, Apple faces questions about how long its services business can continue growing at such a rapid rate. Between 2016 and 2021, the unit sported significantly higher growth, reaching 27.3% at the end of that stretch.

In fiscal 2023, services growth dropped to 9.1% for the year, before recovering to about 13% the next year. Apple told investors that it expected services growth in the December quarter to be about what it was in fiscal 2024.

Cook was asked on Thursday what Apple could do to make some of its services and its Apple One subscription bundle grow faster.

“There’s lots of customers to try to convince to take advantage of it,” Cook said. “We’re going to continue investing in the services and adding new features. Whether it’s News+ or Music or Arcade, that’s what we’re going to do.”

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Amazon CEO pledges AI investments will pay off as capital expenditures surge 81%

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Amazon CEO pledges AI investments will pay off as capital expenditures surge 81%

Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money in Seattle, WA. on Dec. 6th, 2023.

CNBC

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is trying to reassure investors who may be worried about the future payoff of the company’s massive investments in generative artificial intelligence.

On a conference call with analysts following the company’s third-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Jassy pointed to the success of Amazon’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, which has become a crucial profit engine despite the extreme costs associated with building data centers.

“I think we’ve proven over time that we can drive enough operating income and free cash flow to make this a very successful return on invested capital business,” Jassy said. “We expect the same thing will happen here with generative AI.”

Amazon spent $22.6 billion on property and equipment during the quarter, up 81% from the year before. Jassy said Amazon plans to spend $75 billion on capex in 2024 and expects an even higher number in 2025.

The jump in spending is primarily being driven by generative AI investments, Jassy said. The company is rushing to invest in data centers, networking gear and hardware to meet vast demand for the technology, which has exploded in popularity since OpenAI released its ChatGPT assistant almost two years ago.

“It is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” Jassy said. “And I think our customers, the business and our shareholders will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”

AI spending was a big topic on tech earnings calls this week. Meta on Wednesday raised its capital expenditures guidance, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “quite happy” with the team’s execution. Meanwhile, Microsoft‘s investment in OpenAI weighed on its fiscal first-quarter earnings released on Wednesday, and the company said capital spending would continue to rise. A day earlier, Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi warned the company expects capital spending to grow in 2025.

Amazon has said its cloud unit has picked up more business from companies that need infrastructure to deploy generative AI models. It’s also launched several AI products for enterprises, third-party sellers on its marketplace and advertisers in recent months. The company is expected to announce a souped-up version of its Alexa voice assistant that incorporates generative AI, something Jassy said will arrive “in the near future.”

Amazon hasn’t disclosed its revenue from generative AI, but Jassy said Thursday it’s become a “multi-billion-dollar revenue run rate” business within AWS that “continues to grow at a triple-digit year-over-year percentage.”

“It’s growing more than three times faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew, and we felt like AWS grew pretty quickly,” he added.

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Amazon’s cloud unit records highest profit margin in at least a decade

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Amazon's cloud unit records highest profit margin in at least a decade

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Oct. 21, 2024.

Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images

Amazon said revenue in its cloud unit increased 19% in the third quarter, just missing analyst estimates.

Revenue at Amazon Web Services totaled $27.45 billion, according to a statement Thursday, while Wall Street was expecting $27.52 billion, based on StreetAccount estimates. Year-over-year growth has accelerated for five consecutive quarters.

The artificial intelligence portion of AWS is in the billions of dollars in annualized revenue, more than doubling year over year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who previously led AWS, said on a call with analysts.

“I believe we have more demand than we could fulfill if we had even more capacity today,” Jassy said. “I think pretty much everyone today has less capacity than they have demand for, and it’s really primarily chips that are the area where companies could use more supply.”

AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market over Google and Microsoft and is an important source of profit for Amazon.

On Tuesday, Google parent Alphabet said revenue from Google Cloud, which includes cloud applications as well as infrastructure, totaled $11.35 billion, up 35%. Microsoft said Wednesday that revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33%.

AWS recorded $10.45 billion in operating income, representing 60% of its parent’s profit. Analysts expected $9.15 billion.

The unit’s operating margin came in at 38%, the widest for AWS since at least 2014. Google Cloud reported an operating margin of 17%.

“We’re being very measured in our hiring,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on the call.

During the quarter, Oracle said it will bring database services to AWS.

“If this is successful, we would love to find more pieces of their application stack that could run well in AWS and help customers do that,” AWS CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in a September interview.

Also in the quarter, AWS announced plans to discontinue some services, including code-repository tool CodeCommit. Garman told TechCrunch that AWS “can’t invest in everything.”

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