SHANGHAI:- On Thursday, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) held an online hiring event in China and added 24 new job postings for the country. This was a week after CEO Elon Musk threatened to cut jobs at the electric car company and said that in some areas the company was “overstaffed.”
An online post says that Tesla will hold the event online beginning at 7 p.m. Shanghai time (1100 GMT) and will hire people for “smart manufacturing” jobs.
According to a separate post on Tesla’s WeChat account, the company has 224 openings for managers and engineers in China. Of these, 24 were just posted on June 9.
Managers and engineers are needed to run the Giga Press, a 6,000-ton die casting machine that is one of the biggest in the world. This is one of the jobs that have been posted.
Tesla holds these online job fairs in China often. The most recent one was in May for summer interns.
In 2021, Tesla’s sales in China were more than double what they were the year before. Sales in China made up a quarter of the U.S. automaker’s total income.
More than half of the cars Tesla made last year came from its Shanghai plant, which makes Model 3s and Model Ys for sale in the United States and for export. Tesla also plans to expand the plant.
But the plant’s output was hurt by Shanghai’s two-month COVID-19 lockdown, which stopped work for 22 days and made it hard to get back up to full speed. Before this, Tesla had planned to make 22,000 cars a week at the plant by the middle of May.
Musk, the company’s CEO, said in an email that Reuters saw last week that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and that the electric car company needed to cut 10 percent of its staff. The subject of the email was “Stop all hiring everywhere.”
Tesla employees were told in another email on Friday that salaried headcount would be cut by 10% because the company was “overstaffed in many areas.” He also said that “hourly headcount will go up.”
But on Saturday, he changed his mind about the emails. He said that the total number of employees would go up over the next year, but that the number of salaried employees shouldn’t change much.
Musk hadn’t said anything about staffing in China.
Musk said last month that U.S. workers were more likely to try to avoid going to work, while Chinese workers wouldn’t leave the factories.
“They will be working until 3 a.m.,” he told a group of Chinese workers at a meeting.
