Tesla presses ahead with recruitment event in China after Musk warns against work

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Tesla was pressing ahead with its online hiring event in China on Thursday and added 20 new jobs in the country a week after Elon Musk threatened to cut jobs at the electric car maker and said the company “is” in some regions.

Tesla (TSLA.O) It plans to hold the event online starting at 7 p.m. Shanghai time (1100 GMT) and will assign employees to “smart manufacturing” roles, according to an online post.

Tesla currently has 224 vacancies in China for managers and engineers in this category, according to a separate post on its WeChat account, 24 of which were newly published on June 9.

Among the jobs posted are managers and engineers to oversee the operation of the 6,000-ton die-casting machinery known as the Giga Press, one of the largest in the world.

Tesla regularly holds online recruitment events in China, with the most recent in May for summer interns.

Tesla’s revenue in China more than doubled in 2021 compared to last year, contributing to a quarter of the US automaker’s total income.

The Shanghai plant, which makes Model 3 and Model Ys for sale and domestic export, produced more than half of the cars it made last year, and Tesla also plans to expand the plant. Read more

However, production at the plant was hit hard by Shanghai’s two-month COVID-19 shutdown, which put it out of business for 22 days, and later struggled to return to full production. Prior to that, Tesla planned to increase production at the plant to 22,000 vehicles per week by mid-May.

Musk, the chief executive, said in an email seen by Reuters last week that he had a “very bad feeling” about the economy and needed to lay off 10% of the staff at the electric car maker. The email address was “All Recruitment Worldwide Paused”. Read more

In another email to employees on Friday, Musk said Tesla will cut the number of salaried employees by 10%, as it has become “overstaffed in many areas” but added that “the number of hourly employees will rise.”

But on Saturday he retracted the emails, saying that the total number of employees will rise over the next 12 months, and the number of paid employees will not change slightly. Read more

Musk would not comment specifically on hiring in China.

Musk last month compared American workers to workers in China, saying that American workers tend to try to avoid going to work while Chinese workers won’t leave factories.

“They will burn oil at three in the morning,” he told a conference of Chinese workers.

(Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh) Editing by Stephen Coates

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