With an excellent 2021 fresh in the company’s memory, with its nearly 1-million vehicles delivered and over $50-billion in revenue, Tesla has now shot up the Fortune 500 list which ranks companies every year purely based on how much money they made. Tesla has been climbing the ladder each year but it has now made a big jump thanks to a great 2021 with revenues 70.7 percent higher than the year before.
It first made the list in 2016 in 384th position, climbing to 260 in 2017, then 144 in 2018, then 122, reaching 100th spot in 2021. Now in 2022 Tesla has gone up a remarkable 35 spots up to 65th position, with impressive numbers being cited by the business magazine explaining the rise.
The electric car company headed by Elon Musk continued its meteoric rise up the rankings, climbing 35 spots over last year. The company had a blockbuster 2021, bringing in $53.8 billion in revenue, up 70% from 2020, and expanding significantly into key European and Chinese markets. Tesla delivered 936,000 vehicles in 2021, an 87% increase that puts the company at the pinnacle of the global EV industry, with a 14% market share.
Fortune points to 665.5 percent increased profits over 2020, the increase in vehicles delivered and the fairly large chunk of the EV market segment that Tesla still controls – 14 percent. It also says Tesla is still going strong, having already delivered over 300,000 vehicles in the first quarter of 2022 alone, and this points to even higher earnings and profits by the end of the year and a similar jump for the 2023 edition of the Fortune 500 list.
The company sustained its growth in the early months of 2022, weathering uncertainty and periodic factory shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic in China to deliver 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter, en route to posting record quarterly earnings.
All of the growth came from selling many more of the smaller Model 3 and Model Y, which recorded a growth in the number of deliveries year-over-year in 2021 of 84 percent. On the other hand, the larger and more expensive Model S and Model X, both of which were recently refreshed, recorded a combined 84 percent decrease in the number of vehicles delivered.
