Tesla (TSLA) adds shifts at Gigafactory Shanghai to return to full production this month

Tesla (TSLA) is adding shifts at Gigafactory Shanghai in the hopes to return to full production this month after being shut down for 22 days.

Like many other companies, Tesla had to shut down production at its Shanghai factory last month after local authorities imposed serious lockdowns on the population in an attempt to limit the spread of COVID-19 after a surge in cases during the first quarter.

The automaker was finally able to restart production on April 19 after 22 days of being shut down.

Tesla brought back 8,000 people to work in a “closed-loop” shift and sleep at the factory to help reduce worker movements in the city.

At the time, we noted that on top of missing 22 days of production, it would take time for Tesla to ramp production back up to pre-lockdown levels.

A few weeks later, we get a better idea of Tesla’s timeline to ramp production backup thanks to an internal memo obtained by Reuters.

The memo stated that Tesla plans to add more shifts starting on May 16 in order to ramp production back to 2,600 vehicles per day:

Tesla is aiming to increase its Shanghai plant’s daily output to 2,600 cars from May 16, an internal memo seen by Reuters said, as it seeks to return production to levels before the city locked down to control the spread of COVID-19.

That would be an impressive ramp-up in production that shows the truly giant production capacity of the factory.

At 2,600 vehicles per day, it would put Gigafactory Shanghai’s annualized production capacity back to over 900,000 vehicles per year.

With the production shutdown and ramp-up back up, Tesla likely missed out on over 100,000 vehicles from the plant in the second quarter, but CEO Elon Musk said that the automaker still has a shot at maintaining its record-level of deliveries this quarter.

Moderate outputs from Gigafactory Berlin and Texas are starting to contribute to Tesla’s global production capacity, but they are not expected to have a significant impact until toward the end of this year.

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