Investing.com – Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) traded nearly 4% higher in Monday’s premarket as the company handed China’s Ganfeng (SZ:002460) a three-year order to supply battery-grade lithium products.
The order for Ganfeng secures supplies of a critical input for the world’s largest EV-maker at a time when supplies are short and there’s a race to tie up raw material linkages, some of them rare in the EV chain.
Ganfeng is already an established supplier of battery-grade lithium to EV producers including Tesla.
The sales amount and value of the contract are still pending Tesla's purchase orders, Ganfeng said on Monday in a filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
Tesla is now focusing on starting production at two new factories - one in Austin, Texas, and another outside Berlin, by the end of the year. Those plants are the key to sustaining growth that has defied skeptics in the last 18 months: output was up 64% on the year in the third quarter at 237,823 vehicles, while deliveries were up by even more, thanks largely to its Shanghai factory. Automotive revenue jumped 58% to $12.05 billion while total revenue rose 57% to a record $13.75 billion.
Tesla stock touched a lifetime high of $1,094.94 Wednesday becoming the first automaker to boast $1 trillion in market capitalization, The stock has acquired momentum in the last week thanks to a bulk order of 100,000 vehicles from car rental firm Hertz Global (OTC:HTZZ), which many have seen as a landmark in the 'mainstreaming' of electric vehicles.