SINGAPORE, June 13 — Tesla Singapore has laid off its country manager as part of a planned 10 per cent reduction in its global workforce after chief executive Elon Musk warned last week of an impending recession.
In a post on the professional networking site LinkedIn yesterday, Christopher Bousigues revealed that his role as Tesla’s country manager in Singapore had been eliminated as part of the job cuts, effective yesterday.
“Am proud to have been the company’s first country manager in South-east Asia, and establishing the business in Singapore,” Bousigues wrote in his post.
Bousigues had been in the role for about a year, after relocating to Singapore in June 2021.
In recent weeks, Musk has said he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy, expressed concern over the risks of recession and said Tesla had become “overstaffed in many areas”, in emails reported on by Reuters.
TODAY has reached out to Tesla about the scale of the job cuts in Singapore and the roles in Singapore affected by this workforce reduction.
Citing unnamed sources, The Straits Times reported that the Singapore country manager position will not be filled and Tesla’s Singapore operations will be run out of its Hong Kong office.
In his post, Bousigues outlined his achievements with Tesla in Singapore.
“In the past year the team and I built the business from the ground up, made the Model 3 a common sight in the Singapore car landscape, set up two showrooms, one service centre (that I affectionately call the Jewel of Asia), developed a network of seen superchargers across the island, and successfully launched Model Y yesterday (Saturday) with overwhelming response,” he wrote.
Bousigues said that he would most likely be moving back to Europe with his family. — TODAY
