Tesla Fires Singapore Country Manager Amidst Global Downsizing

SINGAPORE – Christoper Bousigues, Tesla’s country manager for Singapore, has been laid off a week after the tech giant’s Chief Executive Elon Musk said in an email that he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and wants to reduce its global manpower by around 10 percent as he felt that the company has become “overstaffed in many areas,” reported The Vulcan Post on Tuesday (14 June, SGT).

The email was sent two days after Musk ordered Tesla staff to return to their workplace, or resign. Based on its annual SEC filing, the tech giant had employed roughly 100,000 people around the globe as of the end of 2021.

Notably, Tesla first started recruiting for its Singapore country manager in July 2020. Bousigues confirmed that he has been fired. He also expressed his thanks for being given the opportunity to serve the company.

“Tesla announced a 10 percent workforce reduction. My role was chosen to be eliminated as of today. I’m proud to have been the company’s first country manager in Southeast Asia, and establishing the business in Singapore,” Bousigues wrote in a LinkedIn post this weekend.

Apart from helping build the business from the ground-up in Singapore, they also made the Tesla Model 3 a more common sight in the city-state’s streets. They also established one service centre and two showrooms, put up a network of seven superchargers across the country, and successfully launched Model Y recently.

Meanwhile, insiders told The Straits Times that Tesla Singapore would no longer have a country manager here. Instead, the plan is for the tech giant’s Hong Kong office to manage operations in the city-state.