Tesla China Has 'Come A Long Way In No Time:' Exec Says Giga Shanghai 2021 Production To Cross 500,000 Units

Tesla Inc TSLA is racing to end the year building nearly half a million electric vehicles in China, almost as many as it sold globally last year, a company executive said. 

What Happened: Giga Shanghai is close to producing about 500,000 cars in 2021, Tesla’s policy and business development head in India Manuj Khurana wrote in a LinkedIn post.

This comes just a year after Giga Shanghai started building the Model 3 a year ago in December 2020. 

“Tesla China has come a long way in no time. What started off as sales operations with imported #electricvehicles in 2014 will produce c. 500,000 cars in 2021 - from a factory that was conceptualized as recently as mid-2018 and started production in Dec 2019,” Khurana said in a post that shared Tesla’s year-to-date production and delivery report.

Tesla’s Shanghai plant has delivered 413,283 electric vehicles so far this year, as per CPCA data.

The Elon Musk-led Tesla has also built a network of 1,000+ supercharging stations with 8,000+ chargers, as per the executive, who noted that the impact is “more far-reaching.”

“Among other things, it demonstrated to customers that #EVs (when built right) can perform extraordinarily better than ICE vehicles and catalyzed an entire breed of electric car start-ups that are accelerating the transition to sustainable #energy.”

See Also: Tesla China Sales Fall Sequentially For Second Month In A Row, Down 2.8%: CPCA Data

Why It Matters: Tesla has ramped up production in Giga China in recent months despite semiconductor shortages and supply chain issues. The electric vehicle maker has sold over 50,000 China-made units three months in a row — 56,006 units in September, 54,391 units in October and 52,859 units in November.

Giaga Shanghai, seen as an export hub, makes the Model 3 and the Model Y electric vehicles; a lot of these vehicles are shipped overseas to countries in Europe.

The electric vehicle maker has two other Gigafactories under construction — Texas and Berlin — which it aims to have up and running before the end of the year. 

For perspective, Tesla delivered just a little under 500,000 units globally in 2020. The company produced 509,737 electric vehicles last year.

Tesla CFO Zack Kirkhorn in October during an earnings call said the carmaker can keep growing production by at least 50% per year. 

“Over the last 12 months, we've done about 430,000 cars of production. And based upon everything that we know in the factory, where the bottlenecks are, what the potential is, we're targeting to increase that another 50%,” Kirkhorn told investors then.

Musk last week praised Tesla China team as he replied to a post on Twitter sharing a clip of Giga Shanghai. 

Price Action: Tesla shares closed 1.32% higher at 1017.03 a share on Friday.

Photo: Courtesy of Tesla