A troubled Chinese start-up, which went public in the US in 2021 as a self-driving firm but delisted from the Nasdaq last year, is cutting about 100 employees in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
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CreateAI, which was known as TuSimple until December, told employees that it would prepare “to enter the dissolution and liquidation process” for the Guangzhou subsidiary, according to an email on Monday that was seen by the Post. Last week, the company forced employees to take leave starting on Friday for “internal investigations”, according to an earlier email.
The lay-offs came just two months after the troubled company renamed itself CreateAI and pivoted to producing video games and films from developing costly self-driving technologies amid disputes among the company’s co-founders.
The office, located in an industrial estate in eastern Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, was locked on Wednesday.
The company’s Guangzhou employees did not get their pay for January, which should have arrived on February 10. It promised compensation of less than a month’s salary, which would be granted if an employee signed an agreement to quit the firm, according to an employee who declined to be identified publicly. Severance pay in China is typically based on an employee’s years of service.
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The employee said no one had signed the agreement as they were “very unhappy about the disbandment [and] that there isn’t any outcome from the investigations”.