Muscatine is very optimistic about the future of electric cars.

Tesla CEO Ellon Maska (Elon Musk) has been a strong language, Tesla will bring the world into the future without petrol. At the moment, Tesla has some of the same tunes as BMW and Mercedes, and Musk's vision goes beyond that. He hopes to bring Tesla to the wider market and liberate mankind from fossil fuel dependence.

Rumors are rife.

One day, "All cars will use electricity," Musk in a January press conference.

But regardless of the distant future, a large number of people are wondering whether Tesla can get out of deficit finance in the short term. Since 2003, when the company was founded and then listed in 2010, Tesla's real profit was only three months. In 2014, Tesla's net loss amounted to 294 million dollars. (And just a few days ago, Tesla's performance in China was so bad that he even made tough cuts.) )

"Tesla is a company with no cash flow," said Matthew Stauffer, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, Matthew Stover. All its stock values are tied to a future that has not been proven by past experience. "The financial Group, which owned a 1.5 million dollar stake in the market, has sold more than half from November to January this year."

2020 years to be profitable.

Tesla held an investor conference call on February 11 after releasing the financial statements for the fourth quarter of last year. Musk said at the meeting that the company would generate positive cash flow (that is, investment income above the cost of investment) by the third quarter of this year, and that it would be possible to achieve the full-year profit in the sense of GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) by 2020.

So Stauffer is extremely skeptical of Tesla's prospects and share prices, and he is not the only investor. Tesla's share price, based on March data, was valued at 25.1 billion per cent for $199.6 a share. (This is equivalent to Ford's 40% per cent market capitalisation, while Ford sold 6.3 million units last year, almost 200 times that of Tesla).

As of February 13, Tesla had been shorting 26.8% of the stock. A growing number of investors are bearish on Tesla, surpassing any other company in the Bloomberg Global Auto Peer Valuation Index.

Musk is confident.

The cries of the losers did not waste musk confidence. In a conference call on February 11, he said Netesla will be able to match Apple's market capitalisation by 10. According to March data, Apple is currently the world's most valuable company, worth about 753 billion dollars.

In a February letter to shareholders, Musk wrote that Tesla's vehicle deliveries would rise by 70% this year, and that there would be a huge increase in what he called "Non-GAAP revenue" (algorithmic composite leasing costs and deferred stock options).

Tesla now offers just the same product, model S, starting at $71,000 and selling 31655 units in 2014. Later this year, Tesla will also launch an SUV with gull-wing doors, Model X, priced at about 70,000 dollars. Then in about 2017 years, Tesla will target middle-income consumers, the Model 3, the price of 35,000 dollars.

Musk expects his California plant to produce 500,000 cars by 2020, each equipped with batteries produced by the Super Battery Factory (gigafactory). The plant is still under construction, combined with Tesla and Panasonic, and is located in the desert of Nevada, USA.

Standing on the Forefront

Whether Musk can accomplish his goal, even the supporters are skeptical. Adam Jonas, an auto analyst at Morgan Stanley, was a Adam Jonas, but his estimates and Musk's were quite different, and Jonas predicted that the Model 3 average price would be high, with each set at around $60,000 trillion, and by 2020, Tesla will sell 319,000 cars.

At the same time, Jonas added, even though sales were low, he believed Tesla could still make a profit and lead the global automotive industry's innovative trend.

Jonas took an overweight rating on Tesla's stock.

Susquehanna's Stauffer also believes that Tesla's share price, which peaked in September last year, was $291 trillion a share, and said investors had decided that model 3 would succeed because of falling oil prices.

But Stauffer said, "because there is nothing to verify this view, the market will simply guess the future situation." ”

Tesla's bonds are also as popular as stocks. In February 2014, investors bought Tesla convertible bonds worth 2.3 billion of dollars, with a nominal interest rate of 1.25%, a slightly smaller rate of return than inflation. The bonds, though not converted into shares, offer investors a greater return, unless stocks soar to $359.87 per share.