Shanghai (Reuters) – Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has cancelled three online job fairs that were planned for China this month. This is the latest thing to happen after CEO Elon Musk threatened to cut jobs at the electric car company because it was “overstaffed” in some areas.
But Musk hadn’t said much about staffing in China, which made more than half of the automaker’s cars around the world in 2021 and brought in a quarter of its revenue.
The company cancelled three events for jobs in sales, R&D, and its supply chain that were supposed to take place on June 16, 23, and 30. Notifications on the messaging app WeChat showed this happened late on Thursday, but the company didn’t say why.
On Friday, Reuters asked Tesla for a comment, but they didn’t answer.
There was no sign of an event on June 9 to hire people for “smart manufacturing” jobs, and it wasn’t clear right away that it had happened as planned.
The China operation is still accepting resumes for more than 1,000 jobs posted on the social media platform. These jobs include aerodynamics engineers, supply chain managers, store managers, factory supervisors, and workers.
Musk said in an email that Reuters saw last week that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy.
Musk sent another email to employees on Friday. In it, he said that Tesla would cut salaried staff by 10% because it was “overstaffed in many areas,” but that hourly staff would go up.
After the Chinese commercial hub started a two-month COVID-19 lockdown at the end of March, it hurt production at Tesla’s Shanghai plant a lot.
This quarter’s output is expected to drop by more than a third from the previous quarter, which is more than Musk predicted.
