Tesla fails to meet Elon Musk's expectation to grow sales by 50 percent, sells 1.3 million vehicles

Tesla made a record by selling 1.3 million vehicles in December 2022, breaking its previous record of 936,000 in 2021, showing a growth of 40 percent in year-on-year sales.

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Tesla announced on Monday that it sold a record 1.3 million cars in 2018. However, the figure fell short of CEO Elon Musk's goal of increasing the company's sales by 50 percent almost every year. The number of vehicles supplied in 2022 broke the previous record of 936,000 in 2021, but it fell short of the 1.4 million required to meet the company's goal of 50 percent growth. Sales increased by 40 percent year over year, and production increased by 47% to 1.37 million. The shortage occurred in spite of a significant year-end sales drive that offered unusual US discounts of USD 7,500 on the company's best-selling Models Y and 3. 

Tesla Inc., which is based in Austin, Texas, also had to deal with rising cases of the novel coronavirus in China, which cut into production at its Shanghai factory. With the extra US push, Tesla delivered more than 405,000 vehicles worldwide in the fourth quarter. But that missed Wall Street projections. Analysts polled by data provider FactSet expected 427,000 deliveries from October through December and 1.33 million for the entire year.

"Thank you to all of our customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and supporters who helped us achieve a great 2022 in light of significant COVID and supply chain-related challenges throughout the year," the electric vehicle and solar panel company said Monday.

Tesla didn't roll out any new models last year, and it's facing increasing competition from legacy automakers and startups such as Lucid and Rivian, which are continually introducing new electric vehicles.

But Musk has promised to start producing the long-awaited Cybertruck electric pickup this year. The company also has started delivering its electric semis.

The discounts, offered during the last two weeks of the year, raised questions about whether demand was softening for Tesla products as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat inflation.

That, coupled with Musk's behavior after his USD 44 billion purchase of Twitter, helped to push Tesla shares down more than 65 percent last year, bumping Musk out of the top spot for the world's wealthiest person, according to Forbes.

The company's stock decline for the year, its worst ever, was more than triple the drop in the S&P 500, which was down 19.4 percent. Musk wrote on Twitter on December 30 that the company's long-term fundamentals are strong, but "short-term market madness" is unpredictable.

Some investors are worried that Twitter has distracted Musk from the car company. Musk said last month that he plans to remain as Twitter's CEO until he can find someone willing to replace him in the job.

With agency inputs