For Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), 2025 was a challenging year, marked by declining sales and erosion of market dominance. While the electric vehicle maker showed a notable improvement in the latter half of the year — aided by the auto-taxi launch and a booming energy business that lifted investor confidence— weak demand for the Cybertruck and soft overseas sales remain key concerns heading into the fourth-quarter earnings report.
What to Expect
The company has scheduled its fourth-quarter earnings release for Wednesday, January 28, at 4:05 pm ET. Market watchers are not very optimistic about performance in the final months of FY25. They forecast adjusted earnings of $0.45 per share for the December quarter, which is sharply lower than $0.73 per share reported in Q4 2024. It is estimated that fourth-quarter revenues declined 3.7% year-over-year to $24.75 billion.
Last year, Tesla’s stock experienced high volatility, though it maintained an uptrend. The shares climbed to an all-time high in late December, before paring some of those gains in the following weeks. The most recent closing price remains well above TSLA’s 52-week average price of $358.74. The value has more than doubled in the past nine months.
Q3 Outcome
In the third quarter of fiscal 2025, Tesla’s revenue advanced to $28.1 billion from $25.18 billion in the year-ago quarter. The company produced a total of 447,450 vehicles during the three months and delivered 497,099 units. Adjusted earnings, excluding one-off items, dropped to $0.50 per share in the third quarter from $0.72 per share a year earlier. Unadjusted net income was $1.37 billion or $0.39 per share in Q3, compared to $2.17 billion or $0.62 per share in the corresponding period of 2024. Revenue from the Services and Energy & Storage segments grew 25% and 44%, respectively.
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, said in the Q3 earnings call, “We’re at a critical inflection point for Tesla and our strategy going forward as we bring AI into the real world. I think it’s important to emphasize that Tesla really is the leader in real-world AI. No one can do what we can do with real-world AI. I have pretty good insight into AI in general. I think that Tesla has the highest intelligence density of any AI out there in the car, and that is only going to get better. We’re really just at the beginning of scaling quite massively full Self-Driving and robotaxi and fundamentally changing the nature of transport.”
Back on Track?
Tesla is executing a strategic pivot toward AI and launching lower-priced models to revive the business. Under this strategy, the company recently launched Model 3 and Model Y Standard, a few months after launching Model YL and Model Y Performance. Preliminary estimates indicate that the company delivered more than 418,000 vehicles in the quarter ended December 31, 2025, and produced over 434,000 units. With 14.2 GWh of energy storage products, it set a new record in energy deployments in the most recent quarter. The company targets volume production of Cybercab, Tesla Semi, and Megapack 3 starting this year.
After starting the week on a modest note, Tesla shares are gaining momentum ahead of the upcoming earnings. TSLA was trading down 1% on Friday afternoon.
