EV giant Tesla Inc‘s TSLA China sales are picking up momentum while being chased by other Chinese EV makers like Li Auto.
What Happened: Insurance registrations for Tesla vehicles came in at 17,400 units for the week ended June 23, up 48.7% from 11,700 units in the previous week, reported CnEVPost, citing data shared by Li Auto. This marks the highest weekly insurance registrations for Tesla this year.
BYD, however, topped Tesla with 66,800 insurance registrations in the period, up 16.78% from 57,200 vehicles registered the week before. The Chinese EV maker, however, makes both battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, unlike Tesla.
EV startup Li Auto is following Tesla close on heels with weekly registrations touching 11,700 last week. China’s newest EV entrant, Xiaomi, also had 3,300 insurance registrations last week. Insurance registrations in China are considered a proxy for sales.
Analyst Take: Tesla bull Gary Black on Tuesday termed the latest insurance registration numbers as “excellent.”
“This was the best week of 2024 so far, and included 6,000 Model 3, the highest since the Model 3 Highland launch last Nov,” Black wrote while adding that the registration numbers in the second quarter, though better than the last quarter thus far, still trails behind the registrations in the corresponding period of last year.
“With one week left in the quarter, 2Q is -7.2% YoY and +14.0% QoQ,” Black noted, citing the insurance registration data.
Why It Matters: China is Tesla’s second-largest market after the U.S. With only a week more till the end of the second quarter, the registration numbers in China are a key indicator of whether the company will manage to bounce back from the fall in sales in the first quarter.
For the first quarter, Tesla reported an 8.5% year-on-year decline in deliveries with 386,810 vehicles delivered across the world, marking the first time the company has seen a decline in quarterly delivery numbers since the second quarter of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic halted production.
Tesla delivered 466,140 vehicles globally in the second quarter last year.
Check out more of Benzinga's Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link.
Photo via Shutterstock
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Comments
Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.
