(Yicai Global) July 19 -- Tesla China is unable to respond at the moment to a report about salary increases that it allegedly awarded to some employees at its Shanghai Gigafactory as it has too many staff, the Shanghai Securities News reported.

Some workers at Tesla’s Shanghai plant were granted bonuses of one-and-a-half times their monthly base salary in the second quarter for no apparent reason, Reuters reported on July 15.

This could be the outcome of complaints made by staff members at the factory in April that their bonuses have been cut. At the time, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said he would investigate.

The salaries of workers at Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory have always been the subject of attention. An ordinary factory worker earns around CNY10,000 (USD1,386) per month on average, with a basic salary of more than CNY5,000 (USD693) plus bonuses, overtime, social security payments and other allowances, a Tesla employee said previously.

“There’s just a lot of super-talented, hard-working people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing, and they won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they’ll be burning the 3 a.m. oil,” the Financial Times reported earlier, citing Musk. “They won’t even leave the factory, type of thing, whereas, in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all,” he added.

Tesla is a profitable company and the performance of its Chinese employees is outstanding, so Musk must give workers better incentives, said Zhang Junyi, managing partner of market research firm Oliver Wyman.

Tesla is expecting revenue in the three months ended June 30 to surge 45.2 percent year on year to USD24.6 billion as price cuts boost sales. The California-based company’s second-quarter earnings report is due to be released tomorrow.

But the firm’s gross profit margin may narrow to 18.9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, less than the first quarter’s 20.2 percent and below 25.9 percent in the same period last year, according to Visible Alpha’s survey of 19 analysts and Refinitiv’s data.

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory delivered 93,680 vehicles last month, the most monthly deliveries so far this year, and a jump of 19 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association.

Editor: Kim Taylor