Investor's Corner
Tesla China’s average April not something to ‘get hung up on’: Piper Sandler
Tesla China’s average sales figures in April are not something to “get hung up on,” according to the analysts at Wall Street firm Piper Sandler.
Tesla’s performance in sales in April in China wasn’t typical for the electric automaker, as figures from the Chinese Passenger Car Association showed that Tesla had successfully sold 25,845 units during the fourth month of the year. This included 14,174 exports that were shipped off to other regions, including Europe, where Tesla has been delivering cars from Giga Shanghai since the beginning of 2021.
However, these numbers are conflicting, and there seems to be some confusion within many analysts and those who track vehicle registration statistics. Initially, it was reported as a massive month for Tesla in China, with the over 14,000 exported vehicles not being included in the 25,845 units sold domestically to the Chinese market. This would make Tesla’s April in China a huge deal: 40,019 cars produced and delivered from Giga Shanghai.
Piper Sandler mentions in their note that the confusion between the conflicting reports is causing plenty of interaction with clients who are invested in Tesla stock. “We’ve been exchanging emails with confused clients all morning, following the overnight release of Tesla’s monthly sales figures in China,” Sandler analysts wrote. “Our original interpretation: 25,845 units were sold in China, but this may be incorrect. The wording online is vague/contradictory (exports have not historically been disclosed), and it’s possible that a TOTAL of 25,845 units were sold, only 11,671 of which were in China.”
Sandler analysts are looking at both scenarios with the possibility that either is realistic. A -66% month over month decline from March to April seems like it’s hard to believe, but reports from China indicate that Tesla’s Model Y production line was impacted for at least two weeks in April. This would contribute to the idea of a massive monthly dropoff in sales simply because Tesla didn’t have the capability to deliver that many units.
$TSLA https://t.co/0bkrR9IMl7 pic.twitter.com/RsvebE7cba
— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) May 11, 2021
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Telsa sold 10,000 Model Y units in China in March, the Sandler note says. The analysts indicate that they believe April’s figures would have been higher as Tesla continues to ramp production volume at the Chinese plant. If Tesla shut down the Model Y lines for two weeks, there would have been a drop in sales of between 5,000 and 7,000 units, the analysts predict.
Still, the analysts at Piper Sander, which includes Alex Potter and Winnie Dong, don’t believe that the lackluster performance in April is anything to be concerned about. “Don’t stare too closely at these monthly numbers because it’s easy to get tied up in knots. We prefer to examine Tesla’s market share on a trailing 3-month basis, and we try to avoid extrapolating based on the most recent month of data. This is the case regardless of whether the latest results were good (supporting our thesis) or bad (contradicting our thesis).”
The market share argument is much more convenient for examining Tesla’s long-term success in the Chinese market. Through March 2021, Tesla had the second and fifth-most popular vehicles in China. The Model 3 is second, with 52,859 units registered in 2021, accounting for 11% of the total EV market share in China. The Model Y was in fifth, with 16,422 units accounting for 3% of the market share. Tesla’s either 25,845 units or 40,019 units, depending on how you choose to look at it until the CPCA gives clarification, only contributes to the company’s strong sales performance in China.
According to the EV Sales Blog, these figures contribute to Tesla’s industry-leading performance as the most popular OEM in the EV sector, with a commanding lead over SAIC through Q1.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a TSLA Shareholder.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) got an absolutely crazy price target rating from Raymond James after the company experienced a tough first few weeks following its Initial Public Offering (IPO).
Despite the tumultuous start, SpaceX has plenty of believers, and the company’s massively successful Starship launch last Friday, its 13th test flight of the massive rocket, went so smoothly that Raymond James analysts pushed its price target on the company to roughly 7 times its current trading level.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
The firm officially put a “Strong Buy” rating and an $800 price target on the stock. It currently trades at around $113. Its all-time high is $225.64, reaching this trading level shortly after shares first went public.
Raymond James’ price target is tied to the firm’s confidence after Starship’s 13th test flight. Analysts at the firm said it was an incremental step that reduces engineering risks, citing the widely successful heat shield test that CEO Elon Musk recently detailed, the smooth deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, and a successful in-space engine relight.
SpaceX also managed to see Starship splash down safely in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy Booster fell down to the Gulf of America with no incidents.
It is interesting to see these launches have such a tremendous impact on the stock and what investors think of it. After SpaceX initially delayed the Starship launch last week, shares fell tremendously. Most probably did not realize that the stand-down is a standard practice, especially if everything is not perfect.
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The mission was initially aborted due to an issue with Raptor engines. This was resolved, and Starship launched last Friday after another delay on Thursday, which was caused by weather.
Now that analysts have seen what SpaceX launches are capable of and how impressive the feat is, firms are adjusting their price targets accordingly, making it known that they have high expectations for the space exploration company.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
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