According to TalkingMotors.com, after cutting over a 1000 jobs at its Sunderland plant last month, Nissan has planned to cut a further 20,000 jobs worldwide.
The job cuts will take place between March ‘09 and March ‘10. Nissan has also predicted that it will have made a loss of £2 billion by the end of its current financial year.
Nissan are not the only car manufacture struggling in the current economic climate: The Guardian has reported that Ford is asking for 500 voluntary redundancies at their Transit factory, as well another 350 staff across the rest of the UK, whilst General Motors and Toyota have also publicised profitability figures that show huge losses. Another Japanese car manufacture, Honda, decided in January to close its Swindon factory for a proposed four months due to the steady downturn in demand. However, on a more positive note, some workers are staying on to work on the next generation of Honda’s celebrated supermini, the Jazz.
Many writers are asking questions as to why the car industry is floundering so much at present, is it down to more than just the credit crunch? There’s a general consensus that the problems start much further back than the motor trader’s forecourts and stem from a laziness and a false sense of security in the head offices of these huge firms. One has to only glance at the state of the American car industry to see how much of a problem stagnation can become.
Carl Mortished, has written in The Times that ‘car companies will just twiddle and tinker’ – instead of offering consumers new designs and engine technologies car buyers will get rehashes of past designs and models. Even if new concepts are developed they rarely make their way on to the market due to the bigwigs’ desire to play it safe. It would appear that playing it safe just isn’t working any more, perhaps it’s time for the industry to throw away the rule book, give up on “Fordism” and offer us all something new!
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