After market close today, Tesla released its financial results and shareholders letter for the third quarter 2018, which turned out to be a historic quarter.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results and shareholders letter.

The company delivered higher on revenue with a new record of $6.8 billion. It ended the quarter with a rare profit of $1.75 per share.

That’s significantly higher than what the street was expecting.

As we reported in our preview post, Wall Street was expecting revenue of about $5.667 billion for the quarter and a loss of about $0.53 per share.

It appears that the Model 3’s gross margin, which ended up being much higher than expected, made all the difference.

Tesla claims that Model 3 GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin were both over 20% in Q3. The company says that labor hours per Model 3 decreased by more than 30% from Q2 to Q3.

The automaker’s stock price is up 10% in aftermarket trading on the news.

This is a game changer. Short thesis is falling apart. Naysayers can't even say that it is because of the credits since Tesla sold only $52 million worth in Q3. They would have been profitable either way. Incredible. Viva la rEVolution! congrats to @tesla and @elonmusk https://t.co/zSCJHbDIW1 — Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) October 24, 2018

The automotive business is clearly the star of this quarter, but Tesla’s energy business also progressed nicely, according to the shareholder’s letter.

In Q3, Tesla’s energy storage deployments grew to 239 MWh and they deployed 93 MW of solar energy generation systems.

The company still has a lot of debt and plans to repay parts of it during the current quarter, but its cash position remains strong.

It grew by $731 million during the quarter and it now stands at $2.9 billion.

Here we will be posting our follow-up posts about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):

Here’s the shareholder letter in full:

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