Faraday Future To Lay Off Staff And Slash Salaries

Electric car manufacturer Faraday Future will lay off a number of employees and slash salaries by 20 per cent due to financial difficulties.

Autonews reports Faraday Future will provide compensation to those employees impacted by the changes once new funding is secured. Starting October 16, Faraday’s billionaire founder Jia Yueting also had his annual salary cut to just $1.

Faraday Future’s latest financial troubles have come to light after a fallout between it and new backer, Evergrande Health Industry Group, owned by China’s third-richest man Hui Ka Yan.

Faraday’s woes continue.

Evergrande announced a plan to buy Faraday’s assets in June but following the initial investment, Faraday Future claims that it failed to receive additional funds which were promised once Jia fulfilled a number of required conditions.

In response, Jia recently started arbitration in Hong Kong and asserts that Faraday wanted to scrap the deal as Evergrande is preventing it from accepting financing from other sources. Evergrande denies this claim.

In his attempts to ensure that Faraday Future is a success, Jia has largely backed away from many of the other business that made him so wealthy, including a Netflix-like streaming service, smartphones, and TVs.

In August, Faraday Future unveiled a pre-production variant of its FF 91, the first electric vehicle it intends on launching. The reveal of this car came 19 months after an initial prototype was shown to the world. Despite progress on the FF 91 being made, Faraday Future has pushed back the start of production until the first half of 2019 rather than late 2018 as initially promised.