Big investor day thingy over at Elon’s Texas gigafactory with some scant light shed on TSLA’s next-gen Electric Vehicle platforms, which Musk has previously mused would cost around half of what the current Tesla’s go for… although that’s changed lately as well

While the world’s most heroic car company has lifted its performance both in the gigafactories and on the bourse,  the EV innovator has suffered from a range of challenges in 2022, from separation anxiety caused by an itinerant CEO spending too much time with his new toy Twitter, to the emergence of competitive pressure in its second largest market China.

Reports out of Reuters overnight suggested Musk is building up for a big production reveal on the top-selling Model Y.

In a typically brilliant piece of Musky drip-feed PR, Reuters says it spoke exclusively with two shady unnamed characters who asked not to be identified about the interior and revamps which have been code named Project Juniper –  because the planning is top secret and they could tell the news wire, but then they’d have to bill them.

A revamp of the Model Y would mean Tesla is on track to offer new versions of its top-selling models over the next two years, addressing pressure in markets like China and the United States for a visible reboot of its best-selling vehicles in the face of increasing options for EV buyers.

.A revamp of the Model Y, first delivered to customers in 2020, would mean production and supply changes for a car now in production in all of Tesla’s major hubs: the United States, China and Germany.

Tesla’s gigaplant on the outskirts of Berlin delievered a perfectly timed sparkling new annual production record of over 200,000 Model Ys on Monday.

 

AMC: The laughing meme stock loses again

As Variety observed, even a return trip to Pandora wasn’t enough to lift laughing meme stock AMC out of its doldrums with quarterly earnings at the world’s biggest Cinema chain down another 15%  over q4.

And that’s despite the incomprehensible runaway box office success of “Blue Monkeys: The Way of Water.”

At a meagre US$990.5 million., the drop in revenue from US$1.17 billion oveer the same time last year almost overshadowed the meme stocks 14th straight quarterly loss – which of course widened to a net loss of US$287.7 million, a handsome beat on the mere US $134.4 millionin Q4 22.

AMC lost 26 cents per share, compared to a loss of 13 cents in the same quarter in 2021.

Even those awful numbers out-bombed market expectations with an analysts hoing for at least US$1.05 billion in revenue and a slightly more watchable 22 cents per share earnings loss.

The meme stock phenomenon hasn’t reported a profitable quartern since nearly a year before the pandemic, a lifetime ago in Q2 2019.

Because owning shares in the company is madness, the stock value initially jumped in after-hours trading Tuesday following the shambolic earnings release. Then, after markets closed, the stock crashed over 8% to near $7. On Tuesday the meme stock rose over 20% ahead of the earnings drop after announcing a dumb popcorn deal with Walmart.

AMC shares are about 40% down YTD and barely a third of their 52-week high of more than $21.00 hit almost a year ago on March 22.

“With more major movies coming in 2023, we are highly confident that our multiyear recovery will continue to show considerable progress this year,” Chief Executive Adam Aron said in a statement as disconnected from reality as a James Cameron Blue Monkey stradling a giant flying fish/Plesiosaur (Plésiosauriens).

“But we cannot stress enough how crucial it is that for AMC to remain viable, we must continue to be agile and nimble not only in running our business day to day, but also in our continued raising of cash and decreasing the debt load on AMC Entertainment.”

That was a shot directed at actual shareholders.

But even that simple debt easing is a bridge too far for Aron and his directors since a Delaware court likely delayed the planned conversion of convertible units APE to common stock.

Originally the Board wanted to tackle its rich and pulsating debt to zero via cunning plan of converting its APE units to common stock.

But naturally, the poor long-term shareholders have been doing all they can to stall the March 14 vote.

These kind of conversions dumb down the stock price and unsurprisingly the AMC Board’s struggling to get the usual ballot box backing from shareholders.

If the Board steals the day, AMC’s total outstanding stock value will increase from US$524 million to circa US$555 million. Frazzled shareholders know that’s not great news because the value of the newly diluted shares will be another step lower.

Which is to say nothing of a business which can’t make a dollar out of a James Cameron film.