A double-whammy of a global shortage of chips and ships is the only thing standing in the way of Tesla Inc. maintaining sales growth in excess of 50 percent, according to CEO Elon Musk.
“We’ve had a fantastic year, we had record vehicle deliveries,” Musk told Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, on Thursday. “It looks like we have a good chance of maintaining that. Basically, if we can get the chips we can do it. Hopefully this chip shortage will alleviate soon but I feel confident of being able to maintain something like at least above 50 percent for quite a while.”
While the chip shortage has dominated auto-industry headlines this year, Musk said the electric-car pioneer was grappling with “lots” of supply chain challenges.
“One of the biggest challenges we had in Q3 was can we get enough ships,” he said. “There was a huge ship shortage.”
The chip shortage doesn’t appear to be slowing Tesla down just yet. The company earlier this week reported record deliveries of 241,300 cars worldwide in the third quarter, beating the previous high of 201,250 vehicles in the second quarter.
