Welcome to this cash flow statement tutorial showing how to read a cash flow statement using the 2016 through 2018 actual numbers from Tesla. A disclaimer before we begin: I don’t hold any position in shares in Tesla, nor do I own a Tesla car.

Let’s start with the purpose of the cash flow statement. What a company shows by publishing a cash flow statement in an annual report, is how they got from the cash balance on January 1st (on the previous balance sheet), to the cash balance on December 31st (the latest balance sheet). The increase or decrease between the January 1st and December 31st cash balance is called cash flow. It consists of three categories: Cash From Operating Activities (basically the incoming cash from customers minus outgoing payments to employees, suppliers and governments), Cash From Investing Activities (mostly outflows due to capital expenditures and acquisitions), Cash From Financing Activities (cash inflows or cash outflows due to changes in borrowings and issuing equity), or terms with slight variations on that wording.

Time to look at the relationship between cash balance and cash flow from the start of 2016 to the end of 2018. We will put 2016 on the right, and 2018 on the left. Tesla started 2016 with $1.2 billion in cash, and ended the year with $3.8 billion. That cash balance further increased to $4 billion by the end of 2017, and $4.3 billion by the end of 2018. What were the characteristics of the cash flow in each of the years, and the “themes” we can identify from these numbers. For each of the three years, the ending cash balance is higher than the opening cash balance, but the extent and driver for the increase varies. 2016 had a slight cash outflow from operating activities, $1.1 billion outflow from investing activities, and a significant cash raising of $3.8 billion in financing activities. 2017 had another slight outflow from operating activities, record $4.2 billion of cash outflow from investing activities, and record $4.4 billion in cash raising in financing activities. 2018 was the first year with significant cash inflow from operating activities of $2.1 billion, a further $2.3 billion of cash outflow from investing activities, and a shrinking of the cash inflow from financing activities to $500 million. We could call 2016 the year of “pre-funding for current and future investments”, 2017 the balancing year of investing outflows equaling cash raising inflows, and 2018 the year where Tesla became nearly self-funding (cash inflow from operations almost equal to the cash outflow from investing).

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