What to expect from Tesla’s Q1 EV delivery figures

Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schafer analyzes the timeline of Tesla's stock performance ahead of the EV manufacturer's first-quarter delivery numbers due out this weekend.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Tesla is expected to report its first quarter production and delivery numbers this weekend, and the report is usually a key driver for stock action. Josh Schafer has been digging into what we've seen after past reports. What do you got for us?

JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, Seana, so this is normally a moving day for Tesla. Normally, the report comes over the weekend, as we're expecting it to come this weekend, and then it will move that following Monday. So the last time Tesla beat significantly was actually a little over a year ago, and that was Q4-- or it was the Q4 deliveries. That came in January 2022. And that was sort of the start of that run there.

The stock jumped about 10% that day. And then you fast forward to April of that year, and that was right before the big drop here. This is Elon offering to buy Twitter, and that sort of started a big drop off for Tesla. But they also have-- or sorry, they had a small beat right before that. It was that jump right there.

And so the stock moved up slightly on that, but then, of course, we had the Twitter drama, and we were a little bit downward for Tesla for a while there. And then you take a look at July, over the summer, the stock had a very small movement then. That was because the report came out on July 1st or 2nd, and there wasn't any trading until July 5th. And it really wasn't that big of a difference as far as what Wall Street had been expecting to what actually happened with the numbers.

Now more recently, Tesla has fallen pretty significantly. So if you take a look here over the last year, you'll see Tesla had a big drop in October. That October drop, it dropped about 10% that day as Tesla missed on deliveries. And then most recently in January, Tesla also had a big drop, fell about a 12% intraday. Also having a big drop that day because they missed by about 20 or 15,000 cars, I should say.

Now the Bloomberg consensus estimate, Seana, for this weekend, or what we expect to come this weekend, is 421,000 vehicles. So that will be the number to watch. You take a look too at Tesla year-to-date, we should note, has been on quite a wild ride. Up about 70%. So it's been positive for the stock.

So far this year, this will be one of the key catalysts to see what happened with those price cuts, right? We had all the price cuts this quarter. Did more people buy? Did they sort of meet what was expected to be increased demand because of the price cuts?

SEANA SMITH: Yes, certainly very significant implications for this stock, especially given that massive rally that we've seen. If we do see a miss, we could be looking at losses on Monday. All right, Josh Schafer, thanks so much.