On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla Motors posted a 4th quarter net loss (PDF), but the company’s CEO Elon Musk assured investors that Tesla expects to see "positive cash flow starting next month" and to be profitable again by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards in Q4 2016. Although the company's stock was down 3 percent at close of market, after-hours trading favored the stock price by 9.5 percent.

The company also confirmed that it would officially announce the highly anticipated Model 3 on March 31. Tesla added that it was on track for production and delivery of the budget-oriented car by late 2017.

According to the company’s quarterly financial statement, it made $1.75 billion in revenue in Q4 2015 (or $1.21 billion according to GAAP standards, which treat leased vehicles differently), and $5.29 billion (or $405 billion, GAAP) for the 2015 year as a whole. Still, the company posted a net loss of $114 million in Q4 (or $320 million, GAAP).

Tesla executives also discussed the challenges of releasing the Model X, which was delayed by a year in 2014. Once it was released, the SUV follow up to the Model S suffered issues meeting demand. Tesla’s shareholder letter noted that it had only delivered 206 Model X vehicles in Q4 2015 out of 17,478 vehicles delivered in that same quarter. “To the degree that we could suppress demand for the X we did our best to do that,” Musk admitted on the call.

"I think it’s the best car ever,” the CEO said. "I don’t think anyone’s going to make a car like this again. I’m not sure Tesla is going to make a car like this again,” he joked.

When a questioner asked what lessons Tesla learned from production of its most recent car, Musk said, "we put too many great things all at once into a product. In retrospect, it would have been better to do fewer things with the first version of the Model X… I do think that there was some hubris there with the Model X.”

This quarter marks the company’s 11th-straight quarterly loss, and Musk seemed to refer the company's troubles to the challenges of getting the Model X to market. “The last several months have been quiet excruciating I’d say... But we’re through the woods at this point.” Tesla's shareholder letter said it projected delivery of 80,000 to 90,000 new Model S and Model X vehicles in 2016.

Tesla added that in the US, it saw the most growth potential in the northwest part of the country, but the company seemed to reverse its previous bullish position on moving into the Chinese market given the country’s current economic instability. “China doesn’t really have a big effect on Tesla yet,” Musk said, adding that he sees Mexico as the biggest emerging growth market for the company right now.

Tesla also briefly addressed its Gigafactory, a giant factory that’s being built in northern Nevada with the help of Panasonic to eventually deliver 35GWh of battery cells for both the Model 3 and Tesla’s stationary storage batteries, which were announced last year. In fact, the company began developing Powerwall stationary batteries on Gigafactory premises this past quarter. Tesla’s Chief Technical Officer J.B. Straubel said Tesla was on track to deliver 15GWh of batteries to Tesla Energy and would use the rest of that capacity to build batteries for the Model 3. The costs savings that the Gigafactory is expected to impart on Tesla's manufacturing process have been cast as a critical part of getting Tesla to sustainable profitability.

Finally, Musk dismissed a question asking whether the Model 3 would come too late to the market to compete with the new electric Chevy Bolt. "If Model 3 is at all similar in its market segment [to Telsa's other cars in their respective markets], it doesn’t seem like we’re going to be demand constrained,” he told the listeners.