U.S. carmaker Tesla said that a media report of its sales slump in China in October are "wildly inaccurate," after the report claimed that the company saw its vehicle sales sink by 70 percent in October from a year earlier in China.
"While we do not disclose regional or monthly sales numbers, these figures are off by a significant margin," Cheryl Zhang, senior communications manager of Tesla, told the Global Times.
Reuters cited an official from the China Passenger Car Association as saying that figures from the industry body showed Tesla sold just 211 cars in the world's largest auto market in October, underscoring how the China-U.S. trade war is hurting the U.S.-based electric carmaker.
The electric carmaker, which imports all the cars it sells in China, said in October that tariff hikes on auto imports were hurting its sales in the market. In July, China raised tariffs on imports of U.S. autos to 40 percent.
While new-energy vehicle sales have continued to climb in China, wider auto sales have slowed sharply since the middle of the year, taking the market to the brink of its first annual sales contraction in almost three decades.
Tesla said last week it was cutting the price of its Model X and Model S cars in China in a shift in strategy to make the cars "more affordable" and absorb more of the hit from higher tariffs.
Tesla recently secured the site for its first overseas factory in Shanghai that will help it avoid the steep tariffs. The company is also launching a new round of recruitment for its Shanghai-based operations, offering a range of positions from electrical design engineer to architectural designer and process design engineer.
