In an attempt to shrink costs and preserve cash, Tesla-owned SolarCity has slashed its workforce by a whopping 20 percent in the year 2016. Though SolarCity is the largest solar rooftop installment company in the U.S, the said move is attributed to the recent slowdown in the market as well.
In a regulatory filing with the U.S SEC, SolarCity announced that its current workforce stood at 12,243 employees at the end of 2016. This is ~20 percent down from the figures, i.e 15273, reported by the company last year where the number has swelled by a whopping 69 percent. This year’s lay-offs mostly led to the depature of workers in operations, installations, manufacturing, sales and marketing divisions, says the filing. It’s also said to have affected some individuals in the general and administrative jobs as well.
All this can ultimately be tied with its recent $2.6 billion acquisition by electric carmaker Tesla last year. During the announcement of its merger with Tesla, the company had said that it would be lead to workforce cuts in redundant operations. SolarCity didn’t mention the number of employes it would be laying off in the said restructuing, but the current figures definitely come as a surprise.
The company is currently scaling back on the ambitious number of homes it planned to convert to clean green energy. It has instead decided to shift its focus on genrating revenue by more cash sales as compared to their growth-focused leasing model they have been following till date. SolarCity, for those unknown, was founded by close cousins of Elon Musk back in 2006, with the ultimate goal of helping make the shift to sustainable modes of energy consumption.
Post its acqusition, the company has already amazed the masses with the unveiling of their affordable and classy new solar roof tiles. It was shown off by legendary innovator and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who took center stage to talk about his sustainable energy strategy as well as take the wraps off some new solutions catering to that vision. These tiles are currently being developed at Gigafactory 2, along with a $256 million capital infusion and support from Panasonic. They’ll soon be sold at Tesla’s current network of retail stores.
In addition, this deadly combo of sustainable hardware solution providers will be looking to add more capital to the coffers in the near future. Building an electric-focused empire isn’t an easy task and both Tesla and SolarCity have burned through cash in setting up their operations and scaling them to the current position. Tesla is also gearing up to soon start producing and shipping the affordable Model 3 across the globe, along side the aim of increasing production to 500,000 vehicles by 2018.
