Tesla stock pops: Shanghai production update is a bullish sign
00:00 Josh
Tesla shares riding higher as the EV maker is making some waves in China. Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian join us now with more. Pras.
00:07 Pras
Yes, uh Josh, the Tesla’s kind of head in head in China. They’re uh uh posting on Weibo that Giga Shanghai is ramping up their Q4 production. You know, this is a uh this is their biggest factory by volume and and Q4 is their biggest time of year for Tesla generally speaking and uh it’s good to hear that they’re ramping up production there because, you know, demand was potentially questioned
00:23 Pras
and so it’s, you know, with high competition in in China with EVs kind of a problem there. So, you know, look, this follows good and good strong sales for Tesla in September. Uh they had sales up 25% month over month. Uh slightly down year over year, but still still still better than nothing for them. Uh as they sort of uh the Model Y L, which is like the bigger six-passenger, three row Model Y came out that must be they might be helping them out there in China uh ahead of this busy period for them.
00:51 Josh
Speaking of Tesla, new buy rating apparently, Melius Research. What’s going on there?
00:57 Pras
Yeah, I seen a seen Melius Research uh launched covers the buy rating, $520 price target. That’s a pretty big, pretty big premium there. Uh, they said quote, we see Tesla shares as a must own. Uh the disruptive force of AI will wreck multi-million multi-trillion dollar industry starting with autos.
01:11 Josh
Yeah, that sounds almost Dan Ives-like.
01:13 Pras
Well, they see it as a disruptive force, I guess, right? Uh, you know, speaking of Ives, you know, he sees this AI opportunity as a trillion dollar opportunity. Uh, Adam Jonas and Morgan Stanley, same deal, right? All about the AI bet with Tesla, robots, uh robo taxis, uh AI, XAI combination. So it’s all it’s all there. It’s everything you want to hear if you’re an investor and don’t care about fundamentals.
01:29 Josh
Well, let let let let’s talk about that. I mean, it is interesting with Tesla. We were talking off camera about this. You research and buy ratings. Do fundamentals actually matter with this name?
01:40 Pras
I think I think Melius said that it’s really kind of like out the window. You don’t really you can’t really gauge it that way. Uh and Dan Levy uh Barclays said that quote that Tesla was the OG meme stock
01:50 Pras
because because of the fact that it doesn’t trade on fundamentals, but it’s also because it’s so high in in retail ownership. You know, high high conviction retail owners, investors who own the stock and don’t tell them anything bad about Tesla. They they’re very they they they believe in the cause.
02:00 Josh
But so many so many folks who buy it, they’re believers in Musk and in the vision Musk has laid out. That’s what they’re buying into.
02:09 Pras
Yeah, and they say look look at the past 10 years of Tesla stock, right? It’s it’s like this, right? So they say, hey, he’s made me money in the past. I believe in him, he’s a vision he’s a true visionary. Uh I think I just saw that they, you know, you know the Colossus uh AI data center, he’s calling the project Macro hard as a swipe at Microsoft, right? It’s going to be doing not just AI, but physical AI stuff too, whatever that means. hardware. So a lot going on in the world of Tesla, but yes, it’s not tethered to the fundamentals.
02:28 Josh
Yeah, yeah. Speaking of the Tesla earnings, aren’t they on deck? When are they coming?
02:32 Pras
Yeah, next week, 22nd after the bell, we’ll be here.
02:36 Josh
Um, what are you going to be watching for on that?
02:37 Pras
You know, I think it’s going to have to be in the near term it’s going to have to be, what’s happening with the robo taxi rollout? Are we going to see more cities? Are they going to take away the safe drivers, right? That’s the first stage in the AI stuff, right? Because we’re not Optimus is a long way to go, right? Uh Optimus and the AI that sort of the embodied AI that sort of controls these objects is the next step and um I think the robo taxi, Cyber Cybercab. What’s the deal with Cybercab? Is that actually
02:56 Pras
planned for 2026 production? Is that still on track? Apparently they’ve seen the cars go around the test track, right? So that’s it’s happening, but we want to get more, like you said, future looking stuff, not just like, oh, Q4 sales, no one really cares, right?
03:07 Josh
All right, thank you, Pras. Appreciate it.