Tesla has just reworked its management team in Asia.
Tom Zhu is now the name that grey or reconditioned used Tesla owners need to know and connect with as he is now the person in charge of the Tesla Asia Pacific business and the right person to contact to discuss issues and future Tesla business with.
Meanwhile, Wang Hao who is the general manager of Tesla China in charge of sales has been promoted to Vice President which happens to be the only senior executive movement involving Tesla business in China.
In June this year, Tesla Singapore’s Country Manager, Christopher Bousigues was retrenched as part of a global workforce reduction by the company.
In case you were wondering, Tesla Singapore registered 924 cars in 2021 and 190 vehicles in the first five months of 2022.
In just over a year, Mr Bousigues introduced the Model 3 and Model Y, set up two showrooms, one service center and deployed 7 superchargers around the island state.
In the same month this year, two Tesla employees sued the company as massive retrenchments took place. The two workers from Tesla’s battery factory near Reno, Nevada, alleged that the company didn’t comply with the 60-day notification requirement under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, according to the lawsuit they filed in U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas.
John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield, who worked at the plant for about five years, were among more than 500 employees at the facility that were let go, according to the suit.
The two men claim neither was given any advance notice of the termination. They are seeking class-action status for their lawsuit on behalf of others who were part of mass layoffs in May and June.
The so-called WARN Act requires companies to provide 60-day notice before any mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site. Lynch said he was notified June 10 that he’d been terminated, effective immediately, and Hartsfield said he was notified June 15.
“Tesla started laying people off in blatant disregard for the WARN act,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, an employment attorney based in Boston who is representing the workers, said in an interview Monday. Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit.
In case you needed to know, Tesla Asia Pacific covers Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Right now Australia is the largest Tesla market and with the fastest adoption rate.
However, compared with Tesla’s sales and adoption in China, America and Europe, these markets are still very small. Most of the Tesla Model Ys and Model 3s sold in these markets come from the Tesla’s Gigafactory Shanghai.
The latest sales data shows that Tesla China sold 78,906 vehicles, up 138 percent year-on-year. In June, Tesla delivered 77,938 vehicles in China, up 177 percent year-on-year.
In the first half of 2022, Tesla’s Gigafactory Shanghai produced nearly 300,000 vehicles, with the half-year delivery volume accounting for more than 60 percent of the annual delivery volume in 2021. Specifically, nearly 100,000 vehicles were delivered overseas.
