By Akash Sriram, Abhirup Roy

(Reuters) -Tesla reported a smaller-than-expected rise in third-quarter deliveries on Wednesday as incentives and financing deals failed to lure enough customers for its aging electric vehicles, sending shares down more than 6%.

That puts the EV maker – already grappling with rising competition and slowing demand for EVs – at risk of its first-ever decline in annual deliveries after years of rapid growth.

Shares of the world’s most valuable automaker were on track to erase by the end of Wednesday’s session all of the gains made so far this year. The stock had risen in recent weeks on investor hopes for Tesla’s Oct. 10 event in Los Angeles where it is expected to unveil its robotaxi product in a bid to shift focus to AI-powered autonomous technologies.

Tesla has been slashing prices and extending incentives, including insurance offers and zero-interest financing, especially in China, which accounts for a third of its sales.

That helped boost China sales in July and August, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association. Analysts believe the China strength continued in September but that U.S. and European demand was low. “We believe China showed relative strength this quarter but was offset by weakness in the US and Europe,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note.

Tesla handed over 462,890 vehicles in the July-September period, up 6.4% from a year earlier, marking its first quarterly growth after two straight quarters of falling sales. But that fell short of 469,828 deliveries expected on average by 12 analysts polled by LSEG.

While CEO Elon Musk has said he expects the company to increase deliveries in 2024 from the record 1.8 million vehicles it handed over last year, Wednesday’s numbers make that “extremely difficult,” said Sandeep Rao, a senior researcher at Leverage Shares, an investment management company with assets of about $1 billion, including in Tesla and other EV makers.

Tesla now needs a record-breaking 516,344 vehicle deliveries in the fourth quarter to prevent a drop in 2024 sales.

“There’s only so much Tesla can do with price cuts and incentives while offering no fresh vehicles for customers,” Rao said, adding that rivals, especially in China, have been launching a range of new models.

Price cuts and incentives have also squeezed the company’s profit margins – fallout that investors and analysts have said could prove detrimental in the long run.

Some analysts said that a return to growth marked a positive sign for Tesla and showed that some of the incentives it had rolled out to boost demand were working.

Story continues

“Taking a step back, deliveries returning to growth were the most important thing to come from today’s numbers,” said Hargreaves Lansdown senior equity analyst Matt Britzman, who holds Tesla shares.

The company delivered 439,975 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, and 22,915 units of other models, which include the Model S sedan, Cybertruck and Model X premium SUV. It produced 469,796 vehicles during the July-September period.

The deliveries were higher than those of rival BYD, which handed over 443,426 battery-electric vehicles in the third quarter.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Peter Henderson and Matthew Lewis)