Tesla (TSLA.O) plans to hold the event online starting at 7 p.m. Shanghai time (1100 GMT) and will hire staff for “smart construction” roles, according to an online post. Tesla has 224 current openings in China for executives and engineers in this category, according to a separate post on its WeChat account, 24 of which were recently released on June 9th. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Among the posts are managers and engineers who will oversee the operation of the 6,000-tonne casting machine, known as the Giga Press, one of the largest in the world. Tesla regularly hosts such online recruitment events in China, with the latter taking place in May for summer trainees. Tesla’s revenue in China more than doubled in 2021 from a year earlier, accounting for a quarter of the US auto industry’s total revenue. The Shanghai plant, which makes the Model 3 and Model Ys for domestic sale and export, produced more than half of the cars it built last year, and Tesla also plans to expand the plant. read more However, factory production was severely affected by Shanghai’s two-month lockdown for COVID-19, which led to it being shut down for 22 days and later struggling to return to full production. Prior to that, Tesla had planned to increase production at the plant to 22,000 cars a week by mid-May. Musk, the managing director, said in an email to Reuters last week that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and had to cut 10 percent of the electric car maker’s staff. The email was titled “Cessation of all recruitments worldwide”. read more In another email to employees on Friday, Musk said Tesla would cut wages by 10% as it “has multiplied in many areas”, but added that “the hourly staff will increase.” However, on Saturday he withdrew from the emails, saying that the total number of employees will increase in the next 12 months and that the number of employees should change slightly. read more Musk had not commented specifically on the staffing in China. Musk last month compared American workers to those in China, saying American workers tended to avoid going to work, while Chinese workers would not leave factories. “They will burn the oil at 3 in the morning,” he told a Chinese workers’ conference. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh. Edited by Stephen Coates Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
