This Analyst Believes Tesla's GigaFactory Could Be Worth $50 Billion

Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdhry maintained an Overweight rating on Tesla Motors Inc TSLA with a price target of $385, citing that Tesla's GigaFactory could potentially be worth $50 billion, more than double the company's current value.

Tesla began construction of its highly anticipated GigaFactory back in October 2014. The factory is expected to start producing battery packs by 2017 and is set to be fully functional by 2020. The factory is expected produce more than 500,000 battery packs a year for Tesla's electric cars.

Even though many people think the analyst is “drinking [Tesla's] Kool-Aid,” Chowdhry defended his valuation prediction saying the GigaFactory is a “new Industry Creation activity,” which is a sequence that has been played many times before.

The analyst gave some examples, such as Amazon which started out as an online book store and is now “setting the tone of the Enterprise Computing” with AWS, and with Microsoft whose “Market Cap exceeded GM” in the late 1990's which caused “a huge debate” at the time whereas “nobody questions that today.”

The analyst concluded: “By the same token GigaFactory, when completed, by itself may be valued at around $50 Billion… its impact will be huge, that many of us in 2015 cannot see… but the ingredients of creating a completely new industry are perfectly in-place… just like MSFT created the Software Industry, AMZN created the E-Commerce Industry, and then later Cloud Computing Industry… Tesla is creating an Energy Storage Industry with GigaFactory.”

Trip Chowdhry has rated Tesla 12 times since June 2013, earning a +22.1 percent average return per recommendation.

Chowdhry has experience rating big name stocks, such as Apple AAPL and Tableau DATA, helping him earn an overall success rate of 67 percent recommending stocks and a +22.8 percent average return per recommendation.

The analyst has rated Apple 13 times since May 2013, earning a 100 percent success rate recommending the company and a +33.4 percent average return per recommendation. On the other hand, Chowdhry rated Tableau one time with 0 percent success and a -8.3 percent profit loss.

On average, the top analyst consensus for Tesla on TipRanks is Moderate Buy.