Saturday, August 22, 2015

Tesla Aims to Raise $500 Million via Stock Offering for Model 3, Gigafactory Development [UPDATE: Tesla Sells $738 Million]

2015 Tesla Model S P85D

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Update, 8/21: Tesla has raised $738 million from the newly issued stock, according to Bloomberg. After initially announcing it would sell up to 2.1 million shares, plus another 315,000 shares for the underwriting banks, Tesla ramped up those amounts to a total of 3.1 million and sold them at $242 per share. CEO Elon Musk now has a 22-percent stake in the company.

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Tesla wants to raise $500 million from new common stock in the months before opening the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory, according to an investor filing posted Thursday.

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The electric-car company will issue 2.1 million new shares as it enters a critical and risk-filled phase of growth that includes transitioning to a full-line automaker with the Model X (expected this September) and Model 3 (late 2017), as well as entering the energy-storage business with the $5-billion Gigafactory battery plant under construction in Nevada. Elon Musk—who currently owns 27 percent of the company—has pledged to buy four percent of the new shares, or about $20 million. Musk is using his stock purchase as collateral for two personal loans totaling $475 million from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who will also receive a discount and option to purchase another $74 million worth of Tesla stock. The actual proceeds, which could be more or less than $500 million, depend entirely on the stock price whenever Tesla decides to execute the sale.

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The automaker ended the second quarter with $184 million in losses, triple the amount from last year, a number it attributes to big spending on dealerships, Supercharger stations, production retooling for the Model X crossover, and the lithium-ion-battery backup generators it wants to sell to homeowners and businesses. While Tesla has raised more than $4 billion since 2013 (the only year Tesla turned a quarterly profit), the company only reported about $1.2 billion in cash on hand and has lost a total of $1.8 billion since its July 2010 public offering.

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Still, Tesla investors have consistently rewarded the company with a market capitalization of $30 billion, or more than half those of Ford and General Motors, and willingly ridden a stock-price rollercoaster that can be as volatile as those of oil companies. In the past 52 weeks, the stock has wavered from $181 to $291 and now sits at $241. If Tesla can really hit 500,000 car sales per year by 2020—not to mention slash battery prices and sell cars in all 50 states—there could be a big return for Tesla investors. But only time will tell.

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