US electric vehicle (EV) giant Tesla announced massive hiring of research and development (R&D) talent in Shanghai as it continues to expand its presence in the Chinese market.

The popular posts Tesla China released on its official WeChat account on Monday included engineers and designers in various areas, such as vehicle software, hardware design, power & energy engineering, battery management and safety testing. All the posts are based in Shanghai’s Lingang New Area of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, home to Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory 3.

The Shanghai base is expected to become Tesla’s second global headquarters, and new models of Tesla vehicles in China are expected to be rolled out in the future, auto analysts said.

Tesla completed the R&D and innovation center and its Gigafactory data center in Shanghai in October last year, showcasing Tesla’s positive attitude toward the Chinese market despite tensions between China and the US in a wide range of areas.

The R&D and innovation center not only pushed Tesla into a new process of localization in China, but also provided the industry with a paradigm for training local talent, accelerating China’s smart car R&D system, according to Tesla China President Tom Zhu.

China is now Tesla’s second-largest market, accounting for 24.8 percent of the company’s revenue. The EV maker generated $4.65 billion in China in the first quarter of this year, a year-on-year increase of 52.8 percent, according to its earnings report. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in early May that the company will not open a new factory in China in the short term, but will expand the scale of its Shanghai factory. In the long run, he estimated that China market will account for about 30 percent of Tesla’s total market size.

Despite disruptions from COVID-19 prevention and control measures in Shanghai, Tesla’s production is climbing back.

Since the resumption of work and production on April 19 in the city, 10,000 complete vehicles have come off the assembly line as of April 30. In the first four months of this year, Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory delivered 183,686 vehicles, more than 1.7 times the number delivered for the same period last year, and even surpassing the full year of 2020, company data showed.

Global Times