Two days ago one of the most important and most watched Chinese state TV channels had a prominent segment on Tesla and GF3:
There's now a translation by a Twitter user on what was said, and there's quite a few interesting nuggets to investors:
- Tesla started working since Feb 10.
- All lines are fully working.
- 2,000 workers (600 newly employed).
- The government provides 10,000 masks, more than 600 rooms for workers.
- Moreover, all companies providing essential materials to Tesla are also working.
Another tweet also said:
- "To make things easier for customers, @teslacn favors #Model3 home deliveries. New protocol requires all vehicle to be disinfected before being handed over to new owners."
- "RayTesla️ on Twitter"
This should address reluctance by Chinese customers to take delivery at a crowded delivery center.
This is huge news IMO:
- The second GF3 shift was also hired, which would double their production.
- The end of December GF3 group photo showed less than 1,000 workers, so the ramp-up is in full swing.
- The Chinese side of Tesla's supply chain was specifically brought up early on February 10 while still about half of companies were shut down due to the statutory quarantine "vacation".
Presumably this also means that they switched to a 2-shift utilization of the factory: 8+8 hours, with 8 hours left for maintenance, on 5 or 7 days per week.
Based on this information I'm now more bullish about Q1 GF3 production and deliveries. In particular the early February hiring of the second shift should help them ramp up.
Edit, there's also this fresh GF3 production data from a Chinese government official:
12k/month is 3k/week and 144k/year, very close to the 150k/year milestone already.
A bit of a perspective of how huge this is: last summer Adam Jonas was projecting just 35k-40k GF3 sales in China, for the
whole of 2020:
At 12k/month they'd meet that in just a little over 3 months...
If they can reach this in February and sustain it in March then even some of the more bullish GF3 estimates for Q1 I've seen here will have to be raised significantly.