It's the same with Tesla. They are selling a shit ton of cars at good markup. If they wanted a profit, they could have one. They just don't want one right now.
https://twitter.com/TESLAcharts/status/1123186053811032064?s...
Can you show you get this from? I see it repeated on these boards, ad nauseum, that Tesla is spending their "profits" on R&D and building infrastructure.
But in reality, you can see from their financial statements that Tesla's CAPEX spending is embarrassingly small for an auto company, and shrinking. They spent $2BB in 2018 and are on pace to spend half that in 2019. As a sibling comments states, their spending doesn't even cover depreciation of assets. For comparison, Ford spent almost $10BB on CAPEX last year, GM spent $10.8BB, VW spent over $12BB.
>If they wanted a profit, they could have one. They just don't want one right now.
You can't honestly believe this, can you? What are they waiting for? Why do they keep raising funds? Where is the money going?
It is presumably quite easy to shuffle operating expenses into the earnings report as capital expenses if a company really wants to, and the 'development' in R&D can hide a bunch of things.
I'm happy to be wrong, but 'Oh, they can make money the minute they choose to, but at the moment they are choosing not to' is a concerning argument. Apple might have gone from "give the money back to shareholders" -> most profitable company in the world -> broke by the time Amazon turns a serious profit for its shareholders. It is yet to be disproven beyond all doubt that Amazon is competitive by virtue of having abysmal profit margins.
Tesla's gross margin is a piddly 18%. They also need money to build and maintain service centers, super charger networks (all needed because Tesla doesn't have a dealer network or a gas network).
Then there is debt servicing, working capital, maintaining their plants, inflationary effects of labor wage (as their labor pool gain experience). All these are not discretionary R&D.
Tesla is fundamentally unprofitable and Musk suddenly has realized this and hence the major pivot to FSD (which is about 15 years away)
TESLA:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials/...
Amazon:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn/financials/...
AWS is their real money maker.
Though, certainly AWS has been a massive benefit for them. Allowing them to truly be disruptive and industry leading while generating massive revenues, growth, and most importantly profitability, however small compared to their overall revenue, to continue to justify their pitch.
