According to several media reports, Polestar's Chengdu plant has been shut down and production has been transferred to Polestar's Chongqing and Geely factories. Affected by this, a large number of employees in charge of production and supply are facing layoffs.
According to the report, by the end of September, Polestar Technology (China) will lay off about 30% of its workforce, and many employees at Polestar's Shanghai headquarters will either leave or choose to stay in the company.
According to an internal employee, "If you stay at Polestar, you will have to transfer social security and other social security to Nanjing. This means that its Shanghai headquarters, which has only been established for a year, may be moved to Nanjing.
A year ago, Polestar announced that its new headquarters in China would be located on the West Bund of Shanghai, a landmark of Shanghai's arts and culture, and that the Polestar brand would open a new chapter in China.
Polestar intends to increase its presence in the Chinese market and said it will "challenge itself to become one of the top three global luxury electric car brands in China".
The reality is so cruel. Polestar's sales in China have been extremely poor. In April this year, Polestar sold 305 vehicles in China. In the first four months of this year, the cumulative sales in China were less than 1,000 units.
On July 2, local time, Polestar released its unaudited preliminary financial and operating results for the first quarter of 2024, and Polestar's main financial indicators continued to deteriorate.
According to the financial report, in the first quarter of this year, Polestar's revenue was $345.3 million, a year-on-year decrease of 36%; Gross profit margin turned negative from positive to negative, from 4.3% in the same period last year to -8.9%.
At present, Polestar has three models on sale: the Polestar 2 electric coupe, the Polestar3 electric luxury SUV, and the Polestar4 electric performance SUV.
In the first quarter of this year, Polestar's global deliveries fell by 40% to 7,200 vehicles. According to rough estimates, Polestar lost more than 270,000 yuan per car sold in the first quarter of this year.
Many people may be unfamiliar with the Polestar brand, and there are still many consumers who do not know this car brand, and even confuse it with Xpeng Motors.
If you know the Polestar brand, you know that its birth background is somewhat similar to BYD Denza, which is jointly created by the leading domestic car companies and overseas luxury brands, and it is backed by the two big trees of Volvo and Geely.
How unpopular are Polestar cars? Li Shufu once angrily reprimanded: "Don't talk about the positive, there is not even negative news, how low is the presence of the Polestar brand!" ”
Faced with Polestar, which needed constant blood transfusions, Volvo couldn't bear it in the first place.
At the 2023 earnings conference, Volvo Cars has said it will stop providing funds to Polestar and seek to transfer its stake to Geely.
With the continued loss of the company and the "weaning" of Volvo, Polestar had to start tightening its belts and taking more radical measures to deal with the situation.
From the very beginning, the Polestar brand has been driven by the positioning of high-end luxury, and Polestar, which is backed by Volvo, seems to feel more superior than other new car manufacturers.
Polestar's three-electric technology does not have any bright spots, and the level of intelligence does not have a distinctive selling point, but the price still maintains the level of a luxury brand.
Such a product is not competitive in front of its own brand electric vehicles. Precisely, this is also the reason for the rise of Wenjie and Ideal in the luxury new energy vehicle market.
A few more words
From entering China in 2017 to the present, Polestar's cumulative domestic sales in 7 years have not exceeded 10,000.
As a high-end brand jointly created by Volvo and Geely, Polestar is like a dou that cannot be supported, and problems such as poor sales and financial constraints also make it difficult for it to move forward in the new energy vehicle market.