Earnings Season Ramps Up -- And We've Seen Some Surprises

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Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing 22 min 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 4 months ago
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What key surprises were revealed in Tesla's earnings report?

Tyler Crowe 0:04
Earnings season is ramping up and we're here for Tesla. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe and today I'm joined by longtime contributors Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. You know, it's inadvertently become Elon Musk week on Motley Fool Money this week. I think this is actually the fourth day in a row that we've discussed an Elon Musk company, either Tesla or SpaceX in some form or another. But today, it's yesterday's earnings release from Tesla is going to be the big starting point. In addition to that, we're going to do a lightning round of several other companies that are reporting earnings. And as well, we're going to jump into a mailbag question related to the insurance industry.
Tyler Crowe 0:53
But as I said at the top, we're going to talk about Tesla here. Tesla reported an adjusted 41 cents per share and beat analyst expectations for vehicle deliveries, revenue, and earnings. But it did fall short ever so slightly on energy storage deliveries.

How did IBM perform in this earnings season?

Tyler Crowe 1:08
Now, there's a lot of ways we could go here because it is Tesla. It is Elon Musk. I'm sure we could, if we wanted to, we could do podcasts for the next five days just on the earnings release alone. But before we get too, too deep into it, I want to ask you guys is like maybe one or two things that stood out to you either in the earnings release or the conference call.
Matt Frankel 1:29
Yeah, and kind of apologies to our listeners, right? I mean, we don't mean to hit you over the head with Tesla every single day, but I think we all had that friend in high school who just somehow finds his way into every conversation. I mean, that's certainly Elon Musk. Entertaining is the most probable outcome, right? Musk normally says something pretty headline-grabbing in his opening monologue of the earnings call. He didn't really do that this time. It was kind of ho-hum, kind of everything that we've already heard. Nothing really to talk about there from my view.

What insights can we gather from Texas Instruments' earnings results?

Matt Frankel 1:59
But as we got down into the question and answer portion of the earnings call, Elon Musk started talking about something called TeraFab. And TeraFab really, really intrigues me. This is kind of Tesla's internal semiconductor operation that it's working on here. It's thinking very, very big things with this. But what fascinates me and intrigues me about the TeraFab concept, even though it's probably still years and years into the future, is this thing called a feedback loop. I love feedback loops. I love coming up with something, testing it out, seeing how it actually goes, and then iterating on that and improving it as we go. And feedback loops that are short work better. It's one of the things that frustrates me about being a long-term investor.
Matt Frankel 2:46
There is a lot of time in between me researching a company, coming up with an investment thesis and seeing if my investment thesis was right, seeing if my right thesis even mattered in the end, and then adjusting my investment process as I go. A feedback loop that takes a long time isn't as attractive as a short feedback loop.

What factors contributed to GE Vernova's recent performance?

Matt Frankel 3:05
And that's really what Tesla is envisioning with TeraFab. Essentially, it wants to have everything in the semiconductor process all under one roof. And that way it can go through the entire iteration cycle all the way to the finish, test it out, and then go back to the beginning and go again. And I think that's just so interesting. As Musk put it, there is some new physics we would like to test out. That might be overstating things a little bit, but I think directionally what he's getting at here is, hey, we want to try things, we want to try it fast and see if it works, and we want to adjust and try again. It's looking to put about $3 billion to work to make a few thousand wafers a month. But at scale, it wants to be 50 times bigger than the entire industry combined.
Matt Frankel 3:49
I think this is just something that is very interesting to watch in the coming years.
Tyler Crowe 3:53
I want to step in here a second and talk about like the scale that we're talking about here. Just to give one example. So one of the things that they were talking about was using Intel's new 14A process for some of this TeraFab work.

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