Hey everybody Rob now we're here and today we are going to be talking about a couple of Elon Musk meetings we've got one with South Korea and one with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Also talk a little bit about Tesla stock. We've got some new cyber truck photos and a few other items as well.
So starting off with the stock, Tesla down 4.3% today to close at $153.75. Tough day obviously with the NASDAQ up half a percent. We'll talk about a few things here but I think just in general we're still in the window where any stock movement can still be tied back to earnings. Of course we got the 10Q earlier this week so still probably some reaction there but we did see also a downgrade from Jeffries today. They previously had a $230 price target on the stock. That has now been reduced to $185 per share for their targets and they reduce their rating from buy to hold.
In their note they said that however fascinating the investment case remains relative price aggression is not supportive of high multiple investment case while this is unfolding and they also said with multiple technical edges from software to batteries and manufacturing productivity. Tesla clearly overperforms on engineering but has fallen behind in building skills and marketing and product planning. So a little bit short-sighted I think on those last couple of comments.
You know they seem to be poking at Tesla for not advertising which is just one subset of marketing I think other than that Tesla does a really great job at marketing. Products planning again Tesla has some of the best selling products in the world and more expensive prices than their competition. So it does seem a little bit short-sighted and can obviously change as Tesla does release new products which of course we are just a mere months away now from the sabre truck coming out.
Nonetheless those were the comments from Jeffries today could have impacted the stock a little bit. So also been some new conversation about Tesla's inventory levels. Those have continued to rise a little bit not all that significantly though. If we look at the Model 3 and Model Y here for US inventory listed it's kind of flat line for the last couple of weeks SNX a little bit of an increase there but we did see price increases of course recently and it did take down a little bit today.
So hopefully inventory not too crazy. Just in general a couple of comments on this this is not necessarily reflective of Tesla's entire inventory. So what we're looking at with these inventory positions isn't necessarily just these you know 3000 vehicles or so because obviously that's you know what less than a day of production for Tesla so it's insignificant in terms of the total number of vehicles but we have to consider that this may not be capturing all of Tesla's inventory so I think the relative changes in inventory are probably a little bit more informative. So when we see those increases that is what kind of causes concern that oh maybe there's going to be another price change or price cuts coming up.
It is important to look at but again not necessarily the the sole arbiter of what is going to happen with prices going forward as we just saw from the US and the X with the price increases there. Now the other thing that I think may have been affecting Tesla stock a little bit today and just broader renewable stocks in general. Enphase did report earnings yesterday and they dropped significantly they were down you know the stock was down 25% today for Enphase.
This has been a stock that had sort of been on a run year to day definitely giving a lot of that back up but they give it really low sales forecast for the next quarter. They talked a lot about how higher borrowing costs are hurting solar companies in general just due to financing rates. In their conference call they talked about interest rates I think 10 different times talking about how the economics of loan financing has worsened due to rising interest rates saying their installers in general are navigating three key three key challenges.
First the rapid increase in interest rates of the last year. Second switching from low APR to higher deal low APR with high dealer fees to selling market rate loans with low low dealer fees and third delay payments from the loan originators or reduction of M1 payments. They continue to go on throughout the call and mention interest rates as being a problem continually saying interest rates are high that's the first thing basically it's getting more difficult to sell solar with loans getting more difficult to sell and a couple more times for good measure.
So of course as long as interest rates are so high we cannot we're not saying that the numbers are going to return back to where they were the demand will unleash only when interest rates are back to normal. So obviously we've heard kind of the same rhetoric from Elon from Tesla for quite some time. Now it is popping up in other places to you obviously the solar industry. as we know from solar city way back in the day can be highly sensitive to changes like this automotive industry certainly in the same same sort of realm. So I think positivity here some similar comments to what we've been hearing from Tesla in other areas to show that you know this is affecting other companies more broadly even though we don't necessarily feel all the impact of that yet again most of the decline in the stock for end phase was based on their guidance they're forward looking assessment rather than their actual Q1 earnings in this case which actually came in ahead of expectations. So it's more of a forward looking thing there for end phase and you know solar stocks I think most of them were down around 10% and sympathy with end phase today and I think Tesla probably catching a bit of that as well.
All right getting into your couple of main stories for today we do have a couple of meetings from Elon Musk first is with the South Korean president who is in the United States taking various meetings. Apparently he didn't meet with Elon Musk today at Elon's request and they discussed a possible gigafactory in South Korea. So the president of South Korea said that should Tesla decide to invest we will provide active support in terms of location workforce and taxes. So although this was at Elon's request looks like South Korea doing a little bit of pitching there to Elon to try to solicit a bit of a little bit of an investment in South Korea potentially something as significant as a gigafactory. They did also talk about SpaceX and possible collaborations there in general the South Korea industry for the automotive industry isn't massive. It looks like the annual volume there is probably around one and a half million vehicles per year. So for Tesla even if they took a significant market share in that market it's not going to fully support a gigafactory that would have to be a significant export factory as well. And when we look at sort of geographically it is of course very close to Shanghai. So I'm not sure if it completely makes sense for that to be the next location for a Tesla factory but of course there is a significant battery industry electronics industries in South Korea. So kind of have that leverage on one hand and a little bit smaller market and geographical proximity to Shanghai on the other hand. So we'll see obviously it's good for Elon to have these conversations and kind of gauge offers. It also makes you know other countries that are sort of competing for possible factory from Tesla you know maybe you have to step up sort of their offers to an extent as well.
Now Elon was busy with meetings today the other meeting he had was at the Senate so some reporting here of Elon heading in there and it looked like this meeting was with Chuck Schumer the Senate Majority Leader and sounded like they talked for about an hour after leaving apparently Musk said that the meeting was good they talked about the future AI and the economy. So this comes after about a week ago maybe 10 days or so a couple weeks ago I guess Chuck Schumer had announced that he was off launching some groundwork for regulation on AI and was seeking to meet with experts to discuss possible regulations in this area. Elon replied to that on Twitter saying that that was good news of course he's argued for AI regulation for you know almost a decade now I would say maybe even longer than that. So I good to see Elon kind of you know making his way out there having this opportunity to provide some feedback in those areas and talking about some other things as well. After the meeting Schumer said that quote we had a very good meeting we talked about Buffalo Tesla as a large plant in Buffalo and we talked about AI and quote. So hopefully some good you know progress there in terms of some of those things and good to see that Schumer also mentioning that there was some Tesla discussion involved as well.
Alright next we've got a couple of new photos of the cyber truck testing in free month so this is on Reddit from AJ SNS. So you know we've seen many of these now I don't think we need to spend too much time analyzing these photos but just kind of wanted to bring those to people's attention in case they have not had a chance to see those yet so we can see the new photos here. No new details that I notice you know you've got the wipers on there we've got kind of the same side view mirrors those have been a couple of features that have seemed to change a little bit from sighting to sighting but as far as I can tell no major changes in this iteration.
Next, just wanted to make a quick correction on something that we had talked about yesterday. So we had talked about Tesla's ranking in terms of desirability of employment from engineering students, and Tesla ranked number two after SpaceX. I talked about how this was from the universe and study that was published last year, and I noted that the US study was published in August, and the worldwide study was published in January last year.
I miss read the date, so yeah, silly American thing here, but this was actually November 1st for the global study that they had published, so the timeline for that would be a little bit closer in two current-day. But again, the US study, which Tesla referenced, was still August, so whenever the polling for that took place would have been obviously prior to August last year, but did want to make that quick correction.
Apologies for the error on that. And then last couple of things, we do have some news here from Honda. Just wanted to correct some reporting. There was some reporting that Honda had raised their eb production targets. Today, they did publish updates on their business, but there was no change in their guidance for eb production.
This is down here, they guided for 2030 eb production of two million vehicles. Two million eb's annually, and that is the same as their guidance last year. So we can see April 11th here from last year, 2022, and we see that same two million unit annual production number.
So just wanted to clear that up, that there was no increase there from Honda, although they did talk about their plans, and their COO actually talked about some of the competition that they were seeing out of the Shanghai Auto Show, saying that quote, "We were overwhelmed by the Chinese. They are ahead of us even more so even more than expected," end quote.
So we've obviously talked about this, some of Tesla's biggest competitors, probably biggest competitors in China, and now Honda starting to see that and open up about that as well.
我们已经谈论了一些特斯拉在中国最大的竞争对手,现在本田也开始看到这一点并公开谈论。
Kind of interesting to see that. And then also on China, to wrap it up today, some comments that we didn't get to yesterday, but BID did comment on their opinions on autonomous driving, saying that quote, "We think self-driving tech that's fully separated from humans is very, very far away and basically impossible," continuing to say quote, "There may be many industries and businesses that invest a lot of money on this tech, and after investing for many years, it will prove it leads nowhere," end quote.
So it's interesting, you know, we always talk about BYU BID being a potentially Tesla's biggest competitor on the electric vehicle side, but if they're not going to heavily and aggressively pursue autonomous driving, which from these comments it doesn't sound like they have sort of that same intent or same desire that that Tesla would, then even if they've got that lead in EVs, maybe they fall a little bit behind on some of the autonomous driving development, which, yeah, could take a long time.
We have no certainty that that is going to be achieved, but I think looking at the progress from Tesla and then even companies like Waymo and Cruise, although they're using different methodologies that have problems with scaling, I think there's a lot of proof of concept being laid, ground work being laid right now that I think would strongly refute their point of view on this.
So obviously we'll see, but hopefully that means that Tesla can have a pretty significant lead there as they continue to progress that. And although it's often presented as sort of an all-or-nothing situation, I'm not sure that, you know, that's how it's going to play out. In the interim, there might be, and I think we've already seen that, where FSD autopilot today are already adding a lot of value to the actual utilization of Tesla's vehicles, the value that customers see in those already.
So not the BYD is not working on any of that, obviously, but interesting to see their perspective on level 4, level 5 type of stuff. Alright, that is it for today, then. So as always, thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and sign up for notifications.