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Tag: Tesla

Scaling Tesla Production

In the last Tesla post on Musk fans and naysayers, I had expressed cautious optimism about Tesla’s Model 3 production growth. There are some legitimate concerns about the process management within the Tesla Fremont plant. Much of the production planning problems have become opaque and also a matter of academic and practice debate (kanban cards and micro-management), ever since Tesla’s move away from Toyota Production principle. In any case, it seems that Tesla’s gradual transition to the make-to-stock model of production continues unabated. Tesla’s Q3 Sales figures from 2018 (Source: Wired) in a snapshot view, look very good. They finally appear in the top-20 models sold in the US and rank fourth in the luxury car segment. In fact, the sales…

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Free Musketeers

Last April, I wrote about a whimsical Tesla analyst call. I had briefly mentioned three issues: (A) personality of the founder vs. personality of the firm (B) over-exuberance about Tesla before they could start making cars in scale. (C) cautious optimism about Tesla eventually fixing things for better. It seems like those were much simpler times, but who knew? That April call was a Donnie Darko style foreboding of many bizarre things to happen later. Since then Elon Musk’s twitter feed and other interactions only got stranger, beginning with an undergraduate-level banter on Karl Marx and capitalism, dissing people, creating tent-city and night outs at the factory, relaxing at a podcast, eventually leading to the costly “420” tweet that was fined…

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Subscriptions and the Art of the (earnings) Call.

It has been slow at the Poiesis blog, as the end of semester duties draw to an end. Meanwhile interesting operations events have occurred at our horizon of interest. Notes will follow on this topics, but here are some quick thoughts. Amazon released its annual report.  Now AMZ is a 177B company. Looking at Bezos’s letter, there is an emphasized continued focus on the e-commerce challenge in India. In fact, India is the only “geographic” bullet point among the highlighted bullet points in the report.  Amazon has moved into India and my prediction remains strong that Amazon is likely to win this battle out and will soon be the biggest retailer in India. (Contrast this with China). An interesting tidbit: Bezos…

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