SHANGHAI (Reuters) - U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc has 42,000 employees globally and 3,200 staff in China, its chairwoman Robyn Denholm said on Tuesday.

Denholm was speaking on the sidelines of a week-long import expo in Shanghai, where Tesla has started trial production at its $2 billion factory as it races to reach an ambitious target of an annualized production rate of 500,000 vehicles by end-2019.

(Reporting by Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh, editing by Louise Heavens)