While Elon Musk is out wrecking Twitter and making sure his losses will be more than the $US44 billion he paid for it, his Tesla EVs sales are faltering in China and fallen further behind a new leader in BYD.
Musk has been cutting staff numbers and sacking executives and trying to reframe the reason people want to Tweet, while trying as well to find a way to force users to pay.
It’s not going too well – at least two major Twitter advertisers – General Motors and Estee Lauder – have either suspended or pulled back from spending money with Twitter this week.
And China is not doing too well – in a weak start to the 4th quarter of 2022, Tesla saw a 14% slide in deliveries of its Shanghai-made EVs in October, which saw it fall even further behind the new number one in the country, BYD.
A report from the Chinese passenger car Association said the Elon Musk run company delivered 71,704 China-made electric vehicles from the record high of 83,135 in September.
This would help explain the price cuts revealed 10 days ago on Model 3 and Model Y vehicles – of between 7% and 9%.
Those cuts were aimed at maintaining sales (and upsetting the prices of smaller Chinese EV makers – which succeeded according to data earlier this week.
Shanghai-based Nio delivered 10,059 units in October, down 7.5% from a month earlier, while Beijing-headquartered Li Auto sold 10,052 vehicles, down 13%.
Xpeng, in Guangzhou, saw the biggest decline, delivering 5,101 cars, a 40 fall from September.
Tesla was the second best-selling electric vehicle maker in China last month after BYD, which shipped 217,518 cars (BYD sells both battery-powered EVs and plug-ins whereas Tesla sells just Battery EVs or BEVS).
In fact, BYD moved further past Tesla in BEVs sold in China in October – it reported sales of all-electric vehicles reached 103,157 last month, up 150% from a year ago, and up from 94,941 in September.
It was the second month in a row that BYD has sold 200,000 or more NEVs (as China calls them – new energy vehicles). It 201,259 in September.
Tesla shares are down more than 4% so far this week and over 38% for the year to date.
