Tesla chair defends the company's Shanghai factory, saying it needs manufacturing capacity on every continent to produce 20 million cars a year by 2030

Tesla is aiming to produce 20 million electric vehicles a year by 2030. Xiaolu Chu/Getty Images

• Tesla chair Robyn Denholm said the company needs to be able to produce vehicles on every continent.
• The company aims to deliver 20 million cars a year by 2030.
• It produced 936,000 vehicles in 2021, half of which came from its factory in China, per Reuters.

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm said the company needs to be able to produce vehicles on every continent to meet its goal of delivering 20 million cars a year by 2030, according to a Bloomberg report.

While speaking in Canberra, Australia, Denholm was asked whether she had concerns about strategic competition between the world's top two economies.

"Markets around the world are really important and so having manufacturing capability on each of the continents is important," Denholm said after addressing Australia's National Press Club, per Bloomberg.

She also said Tesla is "building factories around the world."

"Producing vehicles on continents is important because, again, when you're setting a supply chain for the long term, you want those miles those cars travel before someone actually owns them to be the shortest possible, and that includes shipping and sea freight because all of those processes add to CO2 emissions," Denholm said, per Bloomberg.

Tesla is targeting to make 20 million electric vehicles a year by 2030, CEO Elon Musk said in 2020. At the time, Musk said this would need "consistently excellent execution."

That's a lot more than what Tesla is manufacturing now.

Tesla produced 936,000 vehicles in 2021, half of which likely came from its factory in China, according to Reuters calculations. It aims to deliver 1.5 million vehicles in 2022.

On August 14, Musk said Tesla has produced over 3 million cars since the company released its first car in 2008, with one-third of them coming from the company's Gigafactory in Shanghai.

Tesla operates factories in California, Texas, Shanghai, and Berlin.

The US and China are locked in geopolitical rivalry that has contributed to retaliatory tariffs between the two countries across a range of goods.