Hello and welcome to the Thursday May 9th

2019 edition of Tesla Daily on Official Tesla Podcast.

My name is Rob Maower.

Today we are talking about Panasonic's comments related to Tesla on their quarterly earnings call.

Tesla stock on the day today did finish down 1.17% to $241.98, this compared to the NASDAQ down 0.41%.

Panasonic published their fiscal year 2019 as well as quarterly earnings results today as well as having a conference call to go alongside those earnings results

They briefly discussed Tesla in part of the Q&A portion of the earnings call. I'll play that clip in a second. They gave some pretty interesting

information on production. Separately from the call, one thing that I wanted to point out from the earnings results is the lack of profitability

on Panasonic's automotive business.

Sales in this segment for 2019 fiscal year for Panasonic was about 13.8 billion U.S. dollars.

Obviously a pretty significantly sized business. However,

Panasonic's operating profit margin on that $13.8 billion of revenue

was negative 1.2 percent. Also, interestingly, Panasonic for fiscal year 2020 is only projecting to grow automotive by about 4% to about 14.4 billion U.S. dollars and continue to have negative operating profit margins of about

negative 1.0 percent. Perhaps that is conservative guidance. I'm not familiar

with Panasonic's guidance history, but automotive revenue only being up 4% from fiscal year 2019.

Definitely seems low to me. I'm not sure what the mix is of

Panasonic's business between Tesla and other automakers, but you would think that high growth from Tesla would be enough to drive that

forecast a little bit higher than plus 4%. I definitely think that's something worth keeping an eye on. On the other hand in the earnings report

Panasonic shares quite a few times how they are focused on driving

productivity for automotive specifically in automotive

cylindrical batteries.

That would obviously be the segment that includes Tesla.

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