Tesla on Thursday held an online hiring event for new staff in China and added 2 dozen new job postings a week after CEO Ilon Musk warned of job cuts and said Tesla’s workforce was too “bloated,” Reuters writes.

Tesla plans to conduct online hiring for smart manufacturing jobs, according to a post on the company’s website.

Also on its WeChat account, Tesla announced recruitment for 224 job openings in China in the category of managers and engineers to oversee the operation of the 6,000-ton foundry machines known as Giga Press, considered one of the largest in the world.

Tesla regularly holds such hiring events in China, with the most recent one held in May this year.

Tesla’s revenue in China more than doubled year-on-year in 2021, accounting for a quarter of its total revenue.

The Shanghai plant, which makes Model 3 and Model Y electric cars for sale in the domestic market and for export, produced more than half of the cars produced last year, and Tesla plans to expand the plant further.

However, production at the plant suffered due to a two-month quarantine due to COVID-19 in Shanghai, which caused the plant to shut down for 22 days and then struggled to return to full production. Tesla had previously planned to increase production at the plant to 22,000 vehicles per week by mid-May.

As for the layoffs, Ilon Musk announced them last week in an email in which he said he had a “very bad feeling” about the economy and his company needed to cut 10% of its workforce. The letter communicated management’s general intention to suspend hiring at the company globally.

In another letter sent to Tesla employees on Friday, Musk said there would be a 10% reduction in hiring as many areas were overstaffed, but added that the number of hourly employees would increase.

However, he reiterated on Saturday that the company’s total headcount will increase over the next 12 months and the number of salaried employees will change only slightly.

In doing so, Musk sidestepped the issue of Tesla’s headcount in China.

Musk recently compared American workers to Chinese workers, saying that the former tend to try to avoid going to work if possible, while the latter do not leave the factory.