The new luxury car manufacturer has laid off employees at the beginning of the year
Polestar, a new luxury force jointly established by Geely and Volvo, once had a market value of nearly 200 billion yuan, surpassing Nissan and Renault.
Now that its market value has shrunk by more than 80%, it has announced that it will lay off 450 people worldwide, accounting for about 15% of the total workforce, due to market and business plans.
The layoffs were well undermined, with Polestar slashing its vehicle delivery expectations in November last year when it said it was "doubling down on cost cuts".
Earlier, because he did not pay enough attention to the Chinese market, the head of Polestar China once admitted that "I took a detour and paid the tuition".
Obviously, Polestar's "tuition" is still there.
Polestar, a new luxury powerhouse, laid off 15% of its workforce
Polestar has announced plans to lay off 450 employees worldwide, or about 15% of its workforce.
Polestar's explanation for this is that "the market is challenging", which is an external factor.
At the same time, according to the new business plan, the company needs to adjust the scale of business and operations and reduce the number of employees, which is an internal factor.
In fact, there were early signs of layoffs.
After all, the car didn't sell as well as expected. At the beginning of January, Polestar announced that it had not met its 2023 delivery target. Polestar had anticipated this.
In November last year, Polestar lowered its full-year** deliveries, revised its business plan, and said that it would double down on cost cuts to improve margins, aiming to break even by 2025 and reduce blood transfusions from Volvo and Geely.
That's when Polestar got a 4500 million US dollars (equivalent to about 32$300 million) additional term loans.
The car did not sell as well as expected, and the company's operating conditions were of course not good, and Polestar's financial report for the first three quarters showed that Polestar's operating loss was 73.5 billion US dollars, equivalent to more than 52 million yuan700 million yuan.
Before the losses widened, Polestar announced on May 12 last year that it would lay off 10% of its workforce, when it was reported that it would be about 300 people.
To do a simple calculation, the total number of employees at the time of the two layoffs was 3,000.
Considering that Polestar also froze hiring at the time, this layoff may have been an increase in scale on the basis of the original plan.
As a new force, although Polestar has been in China for nearly 6 years and is still under Geely's banner, many Chinese people are still not familiar with it.
Who is Polestar. Polestar started out as a car tuning manufacturer, and in 2005 became the leading supplier of Volvo's performance models.
Ten years later, in 2015, Polestar was wholly acquired by Volvo and eventually became part of Geely.
Later, in 2017, Geely and Volvo jointly established the Polestar car brand, aiming at the new energy track, headquartered in Sweden like Volvo, and many executives are also from Volvo.
The Polestar 1 hybrid coupe, which was launched in the second year of its establishment, is also based on Volvo's SPA platform, and is priced at 1.45 million yuan in China.
On June 24, 2022, Polestar successfully landed on the NASDAQ through SPAC, and its stock price was nearly 16% on the day of listing, with a market value of US$27.5 billion, equivalent to about RMB 1,973800 million yuan, surpassing traditional car companies such as Nissan and Renault.
But there is obviously still a gap between the popularity in China and Nissan.
Although Polestar has long landed in China, it does not pay enough attention to the Chinese market, and the financial report for the first quarter of last year shows that the Chinese market only accounts for 1% of Polestar's revenue4% share.
Feng Dan, general manager of Polestar China, once said frankly
Although Polestar has been in China for 5 years, we have neither volume nor brand in the Chinese market, which is our objective situation before, which is some of the detours we have taken, and some of the tuition fees we have paid.
Polestar quickly made amends, opening its new China headquarters on April 20 last year and expanding its sales network in China to cover major first- and second-tier cities across the country.
The world premiere of the new Polestar 4 was also held at the Shanghai Motor Show.
The Polestar 4 chassis was tuned by the Swedish headquarters, but it was developed for China and built on the same SEA platform as ZEEKR.
It also takes into account the competitiveness of the intelligent cockpit, and has its own car machine system, and the core uses Meizu Flyme Auto. It was launched in November last year and is priced at 2999-39.990,000 yuan, benchmarking Porsche Macan.
Nathan Forshaw, the former president of Polestar China and Asia Pacific, has said that the Polestar 4 is an SUV model that takes into account the preferences of Chinese consumers.
Today's Chinese new energy market can be regarded as a "champion class" with fierce competition in the world.
After paying the tuition fees, Polestar wanted to get good grades in China.