FF adjusts organizational structure, Jia Yueting cut salary by 25%

Faraday Future (FF), an electric vehicle company founded by Jia Yueting, announced a new appointment on Tuesday, with Susan Swenson, an independent member of the company's board of directors, in the newly created "Chairperson" role.

In the future, FF CEO Carsten Breitfield and founder Jia Yueting will report to the new Executive Chairman. In addition, FF also said that Bi Fukang and Jia Yueting's annual basic salaries will each be cut by 25%.

At Monday's close, FF shares surged more than 6.5 percent. In the past year, FF's stock price has fallen by more than 76%.

Affected by the Spring Festival holiday, as of press time, FF did not respond to the purpose of the latest personnel adjustment to the first financial reporter.

While announcing the latest management appointments, FF also said the company's preliminary review found that its employees made certain inaccurate statements to investors, including about founder Jia Yueting's role within the company. FF said that Jia Yueting's role in the company's SPAC listing process is more important than in the statement.

FF delayed filing its third-quarter earnings report last November due to allegations from short selling agencies, insisting that the allegations in the short selling report were not supported by review evidence and saying it had set up a special committee to review allegations of inaccurate disclosures and that further investigations would be conducted under the guidance of the new executive chairman.

In October last year, short selling agency J Capital accused FF of falsifying vehicle reservation numbers and other issues in a research report, and questioned FF's ability to mass-produce electric vehicles, saying that FF "can't sell a car."

At an investor conference last December, FF expected a cumulative loss of approximately $2.8 billion (as of September 30, 2021) and will continue to generate significant operating losses for the foreseeable future. FF did not disclose details of its financial position for the third quarter of last year. Bi Fukang said at the time that the company had sufficient funds to complete the FF91 project, and the start-up time target for this project was still July 2022. However, the FF side said that it expects to need $1.5 billion in additional funds for the FF81 and FF71 projects.

In July last year, FF went public through the SPAC special purpose acquisition transaction, which is also a popular listing method in the electric vehicle industry in the past year. But as more and more executives of SPAC-listed companies resign due to inaccurate statements, SPAC-listed companies are also being questioned by the market and regulation. Previously, several SPAC-listed companies, including Lordstown Motors, Nikola and Electric Last Mile Solutions, were subject to regulatory scrutiny.

Despite challenges such as chip shortages in the automotive market, under the leadership of Tesla, the electric vehicle industry is still expected to usher in large-scale deliveries this year, and market competition will become more intense. U.S. electric vehicle companies, including FF, Lucid Motors, Canoo, Lordstown Motors and Fisker, have all pledged to begin deliveries in 2022.