[Epoch Times, April 3, 2022](Epoch Times reporter Zhang Ting comprehensive report) According to the latest internal Tesla notice seen by Reuters, the electric car giant Tesla has notified workers and suppliers that its Shanghai factory will not be closed. Production will resume on Monday (April 4) as previously expected.
Reuters reported earlier on Sunday (April 3), citing two sources, that the U.S. automaker plans to resume production on Monday as Tesla expects the first batch of workers to leave Shanghai in response to the outbreak. Freed from the imposed blockade.
However, according to the latest internal notice, Monday’s production schedule has now been cancelled. The notice did not detail why or when the company expected to resume production activities.
Tesla’s Shanghai plant, which makes cars for the Chinese market, is also an important export hub. The Shanghai government has launched a two-stage blockade since March 28, first blocking the area east of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, and then blocking the Puxi area. The lockdown in the Pudong area was originally scheduled to run from March 28 to April 1, and the Tesla factory was also affected as a result, suspending production from March 28 to March 31 (4 days in total). But Tesla had to scrap plans to resume production on April 1 and 2 after authorities extended strict movement restrictions in the Pudong area.
In a March 31 report, Reuters said Tesla has not yet obtained permission from the Shanghai municipal government to ship its assembled electric cars from Pudong to the city’s western region.
At present, almost the whole of Shanghai is under the epidemic blockade.
This time is one of the longest shutdowns at Tesla’s Shanghai plant since production began in late 2019. Tesla is producing 6,000 Model 3 and 10,000 Model Y vehicles a week at its Shanghai plant, a source told Reuters.
“It was an ‘unusually’ difficult quarter due to supply chain disruptions and China’s coronavirus clearance policy,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Saturday.
The closure of Shanghai and the shutdown of enterprises will have an impact on the Chinese economy. Liu Peiqian, a China economist at NatWest Group Plc, estimated that the impact of the measures could dent China’s economic growth in the first and second quarters and a similar decline, according to Bloomberg. Compared with the previous year, it decreased by as much as 0.4 percentage points.
Responsible editor: Sun Yun#