According to the report from the verge.com, the Chinese electric vehicle startup Weilai (NIO) in San Diego, Calif., will lay off 62 mployees in its Silicon Valley office, according to the latest documents submitted to the California Employment Development Agency.
This is the company’s second round of layoffs in the United States this year. In May of this year, NIO had laid off 70 employees and closed an office in San Francisco. According to the financial file, as of the beginning of 2019, the company had 640 employees in Silicon Valley.
JoAnn Yamani, Director of North American Communications at NIO, said: This layoff is part of “Work Optimization”. However, she also mentioned that this has a certain impact on “every department.” It is reported that the company’s business in the United States is mainly concentrated in research and development and engineering.
In the previous round of layoffs, according to an internal letter issued by NIO’s chairman and CEO Li Bin, the email showed that NIO plans to lay off 1,200 people by the end of September this year, plus the last measures of elimination in March this year. In addition, the company plans to reduce the number of employees by 2,200 before the end of September, reducing the total number of companies to 7,500. And this figure is only the company’s external data, the authenticity remains to be verified. According to insiders, the actual number of layoffs is more than half.
According to financial data, NIO’s gross profit margin for selling cars in the first quarter of this year was -7.2%, that is, regardless of the company’s overall operating costs, sold lost of each ES8 is about 27,600 yuan. In March this year, the first annual report released by NIO showed that NIO had a loss of 9.6 billion yuan.
Earlier this year, NIO faced a crisis of sales decline, stock price plunging, and NIO ES8 product defect recall. Both the US stock price and the brand image in China have been hit hard.
