Elon Musk blames scalpers for Tesla’s China woes, remains confident in Chinese market

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk said today during the company’s post-earnings conference call that he’s “still confident” in the Chinese market despite the grim news that emerged earlier in the week.

Musk’s comments are a response to information leaked by Reuters on Tuesday revealing that Tesla sold only 120 of its all-electric cars in China in January. In an internal email, Musk allegedly threatened to fire or demote Tesla executives in China over the slow-down.

Charge anxiety

Speaking to investors on the Q4 2014 earnings call, Musk said that the China situation had been blown out of proportion because the company is still selling most of what it can produce at the moment with its constrained supply chain. But he didn’t hold back on blaming staffers in the country. “It is not difficult to charge your car in China. Unfortunately, our sales team was telling people it was difficult to charge your car in China. That’s pretty silly,” Musk added (hat-tip to Bezinga for the call transcript). Tesla began China sales in April last year.

Musk also blamed scalpers – the kind of resellers who pop up during every iPhone and iPad launch – for making it seem like demand in China had tanked:

The problem last year is that we had a whole bunch of speculators [buying and then reselling the cars]. It gave an inflated sense of demand – it wasn’t real.

Moments later he added: “I’m confident, just as we’re seeing high demand in every other part of the world, we’ll see it in China as well.”

Tesla’s Q4 earnings report (see the PDF here) revealed that the firm hit its production target of 35,000 Model S cars in 2014, though not all were shipped to customers at the right time due to a combination of factors such as the Christmas holidays and the severe winter weather in parts of the US. Tesla fell short of anticipated revenue and earnings and reported a quarterly loss of US$107.6 million.

See: Chinese web company forms a star-studded team in Silicon Valley to build its electric car