Tesla Motors’ top manager in China is leaving the company.
Tesla China president Veronica Wu has resigned, Richard Lan, a Beijing-based company official, told Bloomberg News, declining to disclose when her last day would be.
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Tom Zhu, who now heads the carmaker’s charging network development in China, would assume operational leadership in the country, Tesla said in an e-mailed statement cited by the news agency.
“We remain confident in the Chinese market,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “We’ll continue to focus on providing an amazing experience to all customers, so that they can become our advocates and help us accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation.”
Bloomberg said Wu’s resignation came less than nine months after Tesla picked her as its China head, replacing Kingston Chang, who left in March. She joined the company last December from Apple. The carmaker started delivering its Model S sedans in China in April and expects to start building them in China within three to four years.
“Tesla counts on China as one of their main drivers of growth after California, and it might have been more difficult than they thought,” Jochen Siebert, a Shanghai-based managing director at JSC Automotive Consulting, told Bloomberg News.
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By GlobalData“They need to succeed in China, as it’s one of the markets that’s open to electric vehicles.”
The report said Zhu joined Tesla in April and was a co-founder at Kaibo International, which provides project and construction management services.
Tesla has nine showrooms and service centres in six Chinese cities and has tied up with companies including China Unicom and Soho China to build charging stations in the country.
