The numbers are in, and earnings last year from Tesla and Mercedes-Benz were almost identical.
The legendary German automobile maker said it earned €14.26 billion ($15.47 billion) in 2023, a decline of 1.7% from last year. Tesla, meanwhile, earned $15 billion, a 19% improvement.
What’s different, of course, is valuation. Heading into Thursday, Mercedes
MBG,
was valued at €71 billion, or about $78 billion. Tesla
TSLA,
meanwhile, is valued at $617 billion, even amid a 22% stock-price decline this year.
Mercedes’s stock was climbing on Thursday, thanks to a new stock-buyback plan of up to €3 billion.
Granted, analysts are expecting a lot more sales growth out of Tesla. Tesla’s sales are seen rising 81% by 2027, compared with 11% for Mercedes, according to FactSet.
Tesla also doesn’t have Mercedes’s problem of what to do with factories for combustion-engine cars, even as the switchover to EVs is taking a lot longer than many imagined.
Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kaellenius said Thursday that that the German company will be able to produce combustion engines well into the next decade, according to Reuters.
