Shanghai (Reuters) – Two people with knowledge of the situation say that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has brought weekly output at its Shanghai plant back to almost 70% of what it was before the city’s COVID-19 lockdown.
People who didn’t want to be named because the matter is private said that the U.S. automaker, which added a second shift of workers in the middle of last week, will likely make more cars this week.
When asked for a comment, Tesla did not answer right away.
Gigafactory 3, Tesla’s plant in Shanghai, has had trouble getting back to the level of production it had before the lockdown. This is because of the ongoing lockdown of the Chinese economic hub, which forced the factory to close for 22 days.
Even though the city government helped Tesla a lot to reopen, the company faced many problems, such as not having enough workers and having trouble getting parts, such as wire harnesses, to the factory.
This made it have to delay plans to reopen or increase production many times. At one point, it even had to stop most of the production at the plant.
The Tesla factory reopened on April 19 and made 10,757 cars by the end of April. Of those, 1,512 were sold, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association.
In March, 65,814 cars were sold. This was the lowest number of cars sold since April 2020, four months after the factory started making cars in China.
A city official said on Sunday that starting on Wednesday, many of the requirements for businesses to get back to work will be removed. This is part of the city’s plan to end the lockdown, which has been in place for about two months, and to help its struggling economy.
It did things like adding 40,000 car ownership quotas for the year and giving people money when they traded in their old cars with combustion engines for battery-powered electric cars.
Premier Li Keqiang held a key meeting last week, where he urged local officials to take steps to boost economic growth in the second quarter and stop the rise in unemployment, which had been caused by the country’s strict zero-COVID movement restrictions, which had stopped production and slowed down consumption in many parts of the country. This move came after Premier Li Keqiang’s meeting.
