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Employees of the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin Brandenburg work on the final inspection of the finished Model Y electric vehicles. The Tesla plant was opened and put into operation on March 22, 2022.

Patrick Pleuil | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Shares in electric vehicle makers Tesla dropped 4% after the company reported first-quarter earnings after the bell. Here are the results.

  • Earnings per share: 85 cents adj. vs 85 cents expected, according to the average analyst estimate compiled by Refinitiv
  • Revenue: $23.33 billion vs $23.21 billion expected, according to Refinitiv estimates

Net income came in at $2.51 billion, down 24% from last year, while GAAP earnings came in at 73 cents, down 23% from the year-ago quarter.

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Tesla specified, in a shareholder deck, that “underutilization of new factories” stressed margins, along with higher raw material, commodity, logistics and warranty costs, and lower revenue from environmental credits, all contributing to the drop in earnings from last year.

Automotive revenue, Tesla’s core segment, reached $19.96 billion in the quarter, up 18% from last year. Total revenue was up 24%.

Tesla Energy revenue soared to $1.53 billion, up 148% compared to the same period last year. Tesla’s energy storage systems deployment increased to 3.9 GWh, or by 360% the company said. These lithium-ion battery based energy storage systems, made by Tesla, include the home backup battery, called the Powerwall, and the utility-scale Megapack system which enables utilities to store adn use more energy generated from renewable, but intermittent, sources like solar and wind. 

Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call will be livestreamed via Twitter, a first for the electric vehicle maker. CEO Elon Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla holdings in 2022 to finance a $44 billion buyout of the social media company, where he is now also CEO.

The company cut prices on its vehicles at the end of last year and into the first quarter of 2023, including additional cuts Tuesday night. At the same time, Tesla is charting ambitious plans for expansion and increased capital expenditures.

Tesla currently sells four EV models, which are produced at two vehicle assembly plants in the U.S., one in Shanghai and another outside of Berlin.

Shareholders who submitted questions ahead of the earnings call for management’s consideration were seeking updates on the company’s trapezoidal, sci-fi inspired Cybertruck, the company’s energy division, and the timing for a new model vehicle from Tesla.

In early April, Tesla reported vehicle deliveries of 422,875 vehicles in the first quarter, the closest approximation of sales disclosed by the company. Production was slightly higher than deliveries for the first three months of 2023 at 440,808 vehicles.

A month earlier, Musk announced plans to build a Tesla factory in Monterrey, Mexico, a day’s drive from a relatively new factory in Austin, Texas. And more recently, Tesla said it plans to set up a factory to make Megapacks, or large lithium ion battery-based energy storage systems, in Shanghai.

According to a financial filing published in late January, Tesla expected to spend between $7 billion and $9 billion in 2024 and 2025, an increase in capital expenditures of about $1 billion in the next two years.

Tesla shares have rebounded this year from a dismal 2022, when they lost about two-thirds of their value alongside a plunge in tech companies. The stock is up 48% in 2023.

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Cloud software company ServiceTitan files to go public on Nasdaq

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Cloud software company ServiceTitan files to go public on Nasdaq

ServiceTitan offices in Draper, Utah.

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ServiceTitan, a company that sells software to contractors such as plumbers and roofers, on Monday filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TTAN.”

The filing suggests that investors could be getting more interested in next-generation software companies. Just a few, including Reddit and Rubrik, debuted on public markets in the U.S. this year, and chipmaker Cerebras filed for an initial public offering. There were basically no tech initial public offerings in 2021 or 2022 as central bankers pushed up interest rates to flight inflation, making investors less willing to bet on money-losing challengers.

Based in Glendale, California, ServiceTitan offers cloud software for advertising, scheduling jobs, dispatching, producing invoices and taking payments. It had a $35.7 million net loss on $193 million in revenue in the quarter that ended on July 31, according to the filing. Revenue was up about 24% year over year, and the quarterly loss had narrowed from almost $52 million.

ServiceTitan’s revenue growth rate will stand out for people investing in cloud stocks, who have seen rates sag with few new public companies in the sector. The average growth rate for Bessemer’s Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, the basis for the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, is 16.6%.

The company was originally founded in 2007 by Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan, whose fathers were both residential contractors. While most ServiceTitan customers are small and medium-sized businesses, it has started focusing more on selling products to big companies and construction customers, according to the filing.

ServiceTitan plans to keep up to 5% of shares in the IPO for eligible clients, the founders’ friends and family members and others through a directed share program.

Investors include Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Iconiq and TPG. Iconiq on its own controlled 24% of the compan’s Class A shares.

Competitors include Salesforce and SAP, along with specialty companies such as HouseCall Pro, Jobber and Workwave.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are among the company’s IPO underwriters.

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Tesla stock pops 8% in premarket after report Trump wants to relax U.S. self-driving rules

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Tesla stock pops 8% in premarket after report Trump wants to relax U.S. self-driving rules

Tesla CEO Elon Musk (R) joins former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally at the site of his first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.

Jim Watson | Afp | Getty Images

Tesla shares jumped on Monday following a report that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team are planning to make a federal framework to regulate self-driving vehicles a top priority for the U.S. Transport Department.

As of 6:11 a.m. ET, Tesla stock was up 7.98% in U.S. premarket trading after the release of the Bloomberg News report, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

CNBC could not independently verify the report and has requested comment from the Trump team and from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a Transportation Department unit tasked to oversee self-driving technologies.

Musk was a central figure in the business world pushing for Trump’s return to the White House in the lead-up to this month’s elections. The tech billionaire now stands to benefit from the close relationship he has formed with the Republican politician, who previously served a first presidential term between 2017 and 2021.

Last week, Trump picked Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency — or “DOGE for short — which he said would end government “bureaucracy,” relax “excess” regulations and cut “wasteful” expenditures.

A federal framework for regulating self-driving vehicles would be a major boon to Musk’s Tesla, which has been promising fully self-driving vehicles for several years but has so far failed to deliver a car capable of being driven autonomously without a human behind the wheel.

The long-term vision for Tesla is to produce a fleet of so-called “robotaxis,” autonomous vehicles that can drive people around without the need for human supervision.

Last month, Musk showed off Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi — a concept car called the “Cybercab,” a $30,000 two-seater vehicle with no steering wheels or pedals.

Tesla has already been beaten to the punch in the robotaxi race by Google’s Waymo venture, which is among the few companies that have successfully launched self-driving cars on public roads.

Speaking during an event unveiling Tesla’s Cybercab and “Robovan” vehicles, Musk said he expects Tesla to have “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving technology up and running in Texas and California next year in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.

Full Self-Driving, or FSD, is Tesla’s premium driver assistance system, currently available in a “supervised” version for Tesla electric vehicles. FSD currently requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

Trump’s transition team is reportedly looking for policy leaders for the Transportation Department to develop a federal regulatory framework for self-driving vehicles, according to Bloomberg.

They include Emil Michael, a former Uber executive, Republican Representatives Sam Graves of Missouri and Garret Graves of Louisiana, Bloomberg reported.

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European tech CEOs urge ‘Europe-first’ mentality to counter U.S. dominance after Trump victory

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European tech CEOs urge 'Europe-first' mentality to counter U.S. dominance after Trump victory

Thomas Plantenga, CEO of used fashion resale app Vinted, on center stage during Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Harry Murphy | Sportsfile for Web Summit Getty Images

LISBON, Portugal — Tech CEOs in Europe are urging region al countries to take bolder action to tackle Big Tech’s dominance and counter reliance on the U.S. for critical technologies like artificial intelligence after Donald Trump’s electoral win.

The Republican politician’s victory was a key topic among prominent tech bosses at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Many attendants said they’re unsure of what to expect from the U.S. president-elect, citing this unpredictability as a core challenge at present.

Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss VPN developer Proton, says Europe should echo American protectionism and adopt a more “Europe-first” approach to technology — in part to reverse the trend of the last two decades, during which much of the Western world’s most important technologies, from web browsing to smartphones, have become dominated by a handful of large U.S. tech firms.

VPNs, or virtual private networks, are services that encrypt data and mask a user’s IP address to hide browsing activity and bypass censorship.

“It’s time for Europe to step up,” Yen told CNBC on the sidelines of Web Summit. “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to be more aggressive. And the time is now, because we now have a leader in the U.S. that is ‘America-first,’ so I think our European leaders should be ‘Europe-first.'”

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One key push for the past decade from the European Union has been to take legal action and introduce tough new regulations to tackle the dominance of large technology players, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.

As Trump prepares to come into power for a second mandate, concerns have now mounted that Europe might reel in its tough approach to tech giants out of fear of retaliation from the new administration.

US Big Tech playing ‘extremely unfairly’

Proton’s Yen, for one, urged the EU not to water down its attempts  to rein in America’s tech giants.

“Europe has been thinking in a very globalist mindset. They’re thinking we need to be fair to everybody, we need to open our market to everybody, we need to play fair, because we believe in fairness,” he told CNBC.

“Well, guess what? The Americans and the Chinese didn’t get the memo. They have been playing extremely unfairly for the last 20 years. And now they have a president that is extremely ‘America-first.'” 

Mitchell Baker, former CEO of American open internet non-profit Mozilla Foundation, said the EU’s DMA has led to meaningful changes for the Firefox browser, with activity increasing since Google implemented a “choice screen” on Android phones that enables users to select their search engine.

“The change in Firefox new users and market share on Android is noticeable,” Baker said. “That’s nice for us — but it’s also an indicator of how much power and centralized distribution that these companies have.”

She added, “This change in usage because of one choice screen isn’t the full picture. But it is an indicator of the kind of things that consumers can’t choose and that businesses can’t build successfully because of the way the tech industry is structured right now.”

Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-headquartered used clothing resale app Vinted, urged Europe to take the “right choices” to ensure the continent can “fend for ourselves” and does not get “left behind.”

“If you look very realistically at what countries do, they try to take care of themselves and they try to form coalitions to be stronger themselves, and as a coalition be stronger,” Plantenga told CNBC in an interview. “We have a lot of very talented, well-educated people.”

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“We need [to] ensure that we can take care of our own safety, that we can take care of our own energy, that we ensure to keep on investing in our education and innovation so that we can keep up with the rest [of the world],” he stressed. “If we don’t, then we’ll be left behind. In every collaboration, it’s always a trade. And if we don’t have much to trade, we become weaker.”

‘AI sovereignty’ now a key battleground

Another theme that attracted much chatter on the ground at Web Summit was the idea of “AI sovereignty” — which refers to countries and regions localizing critical computing infrastructure behind AI services, so that these systems become more reflective of regional languages, cultures and values.

With Microsoft becoming a key player in AI, concerns have surfaced that the maker of the Windows operating system and Office productivity tools suite has secured a dominant position when it comes to foundational AI tools.

The tech giant is a key backer behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, whose technology it also heavily uses in its own products.

For some startups, Microsoft’s decision to embrace AI has resulted in harmful, anti-competitive effects.

Last year, Microsoft hiked the fees it charges search engines to use its Bing Search APIs, which allow developers access to the tech giant’s backend search infrastructure — in part because of higher costs attached to its AI-powered search features.

“They’re gradually reducing our revenue — we’re still relying on them — and that reduces our capacity to do things,” Christian Kroll, CEO of sustainability-focused search engine Ecosia, told CNBC. “Microsoft is a very fierce competitor.”

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

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Ecosia recently partnered with fellow search provider Qwant to build a European search index and reduce dependence on U.S. Big Tech to deliver web browsing results.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s AI Act, a landmark artificial intelligence law with global implications, introduces new transparency requirements and restrictions on companies developing and using AI.

The laws are likely to have a big impact on predominantly U.S. tech firms, since they’re the ones doing much of the development of — and investment in — AI.

With Trump set to come into power, it’s unclear what that could mean for the global AI regulatory landscape.

Shelley McKinley, chief legal officer of code repository platform GitHub, said she can’t predict what Trump will do in his second term — but that businesses are planning for a range of different scenarios in the meantime.

“We will learn in the next few months what President-elect Trump will say, and in January we will start seeing some of what President Trump does in this area,” McKinley said during a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.

“I do think it is important that we all, as society, as businesses, as people, continue to think about the different scenarios,” she added. “I think, as with any political change, as with any world change, we’re still all thinking about what are all of the scenarios we might operate.”

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