Moose – stock.adobe.com
Tesla’s most productive manufacturing plant in Shanghai reopened on 19 April. 8000 employees are returning to work after a three-week closure due to a COVID-19 outbreak.
The company has resumed manufacturing of battery modules and electric motors and started a few general assembly lines, according to Kankannews, a state outlet in Shanghai, without providing details on production capacity. The company has enough components for a week’s worth of production, and the local government is helping coordinate with over 100 suppliers to get supply chains flowing again.
Why it matters
At a production capacity of around 2,000 vehicles per day, Tesla is expected to have missed out already on over 40,000 vehicles this quarter, and it could see production down by tens of thousands more during the ramp-up.
Tesla will report first-quarter numbers after the close of trading on Wednesday. The stock is down about 10% since the plant closure. The S&P 500 has dropped about 4% and the Nasdaq Composite is off about 7% over the same period.
Context
Tesla guided for 500,000 vehicles to come out of Giga Shanghai in 2021. The automaker ended up delivering a total of over 936,000 EVs in 2021, with about one out of every five vehicles for the year coming out of Giga Shanghai in the fourth quarter alone. In January 2022, the Tesla China factory saw a YoY delivery increase of nearly 300 percent.
Tesla had 15,000 production staff at the Shanghai plant at the end of last year and plans to increase to 19,000.
