Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is to make hundreds of staff redundant at its factory in Halewood, Merseyside.
The plant, which produces the Range Rover Evoque and Land Rover Discovery Sport, will switch its operating pattern in April, affecting around 10% of its 4000-strong workforce (excluding agency staff).
The British manufacturer said in a statement: "Through its ongoing transformation programme, JLR is taking action to optimise performance, enable sustainable growth and safeguard the long-term success of our business.
"Central to the Halewood manufacturing strategy, we are moving from a three shift to a 'two-plus' shift pattern from April 2020. This will deliver significant operating efficiencies at the plant, while enabling us to meet the growing customer demand for our new Evoque and Discovery Sport.
"Halewood employees have the opportunity to leave through an enhanced voluntary redundancy programme."
Both models produced at the factory are continuing sales successes, having respectively entered a new model generation and undergone heavy revisions last year, and JLR states that the shift change "is about efficiency, not loss of volume".
JLR has been undergoing a wide-reaching, £2.5 billion cost-cutting programme in the past few years. Named Project Charge, it has returned the company to profit in the third financial quarter of 2019 and is due to be completed in the next few months.
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Ralf Speth retires
So at last JLR can get some fresh strategic thinking after Speth's failed tenure where he put in place a naive product plan that led to sales cannibalisation, stubborn resistance to accept electrification, and poor people skills that led to an exodus of senior talent. If I would advise his replacement to ignore any advice he may give.
Did anybody actuallyr ead the
Did anybody actuallyr ead the bloody article? - Volume and output is staying the same. That suggests the cars are still selling but productivity improvements allow the same number of cars to be churned out through 2 shifts. It also states that the company has rturned to profit as a result of similar initiatives across the business - that sounds like management doing what they should be doing.
rickerby wrote:
More JLR hubris
everyone goes on about
everyone goes on about mismanagement, but how can a 200k sales a year to 700k sales a year and growing again, along with profits superceeding anything in its history, be claimed as mismanagement, and before anyone goes on about the huge loss last year, yes it was, but then every company in the world does that, they just decided to do it in one hit at once to get it out of the way.
They are rationalising now, becausee of the huge investments needed in years to come for EV production, even with co-operation with BMW, the costs are going to be massive, for both brands, so why not try and save now for spend later, and sales of all LR products are exceeding last years figures, just look at the SMMT model lists, sales are also up in the USA, China and Europe wide, for both brands, and the UK saw sales increases for the entire year 2019, again for both brands, again, just look at the SMMT sales, not registrations.But as per usual just because i put the facts i will get flamed by the same morons, I dont care, i know what i am talking about, keyboard warriors just whine and moan, i have forgotten more about JLR than those will ever know.
jonboy4969 wrote:
I don’t know where you get your sales figures from but you’re wrong on almost all counts