Tesla has fired its Singapore country manager Christopher Bousigues who had just been with the firm for a year and had helped the company grow its operations in the island nation.
Bousigues shared the news on a LinkedIn post stating: “Tesla announced a 10% of workforce reduction. My role was chosen to be eliminated as of today.”
According to his LinkedIn page, he joined Tesla from SAP in June 2021. In the post, he said: “Am proud to have been the company’s first country manager in South East Asia, and establishing the business in Singapore.”
Additionally, Bousigues wrote while explaining the company’s growth in the island nation: “In the past year the team and I built the business from the ground up, made of the Model 3 a common sight in the Singapore car landscape, set up 2 showrooms, 1 service centre (that I affectionately call the Jewel of Asia), developed a network of 7 superchargers across the island and successfully launched Model Y yesterday with overwhelming response.”
Earlier this month, it was reported that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needs to lay off approximately 10% of the company’s salaried employees.
Company executives received a message regarding Musk’s concerns and they were also instructed to “pause all hiring worldwide”.
The bleak forecast came two days after the billionaire warned employees to return to work or leave, and it adds to a rising chorus of warnings from corporate executives about the recession’s dangers.
Later, in another email to the employees, Musk stated that Tesla will reduce salaried headcount by 10% because it has become “overstaffed” in many places, while also adding that hourly headcount would increase.
It should be noted that Tesla and its subsidiaries employed about 100,000 employees at the end of 2021, according to the company’s annual SEC report. This means that thousands of jobs are at risk.
However, the American auto giant had approximately 5,000 job listings on LinkedIn before Musk’s warning, ranging from sales in Tokyo to engineers at its upcoming Berlin gigafactory to deep learning scientists in Palo Alto.
Even on June 9, it announced an online hiring event for Shanghai on its WeChat channel.
Musk’s insistence that employees return to work has already been met with opposition in Germany. Reportedly, his plan to slash employee strength would also find opposition in the Netherlands, where Tesla has its European headquarters.
The billionaire had cautioned about the dangers of recession in the past few weeks, but his email ordering a hiring halt and staff reductions was the clearest and most high-profile statement of its sort from a carmaker CEO, with others expressing sky-high demand.
It is noteworthy that inflation in the United States is near 40-year highs, producing a rise in the cost of living for Americans, while the Federal Reserve has the tough task of reducing demand enough to keep inflation in check without triggering recession.
Meanwhile, Tesla struggled to restart production in China’s Shanghai factory after Covid-19 lockdowns imposed costly outages. Several analysts have lately lowered their Tesla price targets, citing reduced output at the Shanghai factory, which serves as a hub for EV production in China and for export.
It is important to note that according to company filings and data on sales in China, the Asian country accounted for slightly over a third of Tesla’s global deliveries in 2021.
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