Land Rover has created 275 new jobs at its Solihull plant due to increased demand for its range of off-roaders.
March was the best month for new car sales in Land Rover's 62-year history as the firm shifted more than 11,300 vehicles worldwide. This was a a 67 per cent rise on March 2009 and the 275 extra staff are required to join the 5000-strong workforce immediately to help the firm keep up with the increased demand.
The Solihull plant is responsible for producing the Defender, Discover 4, Range Rover and Range Rover Sport models. Sales of the latter three models were up 58 per cent, 36 per cent and 70 per cent respectively year-on-year in March.
Phil Popham, Land Rover managing director, said: "These additional positions are excellent news for the manufacturing industry in the Midlands.
"It comes as a result of a phenomenal response received from customers and the media to the 2010 model year range, giving Land Rover an incredible start to the year."
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Re: New jobs at Land Rover
Interesting notion coming from you Nick, given that you follow it with the usual anti-JLR diatribe and skewed analysis. YTD sales in the UK are down 11% so far, which I'd say was pretty outstanding given that the X Type and XJ were both in the 2009 sales stats. The same, as you well know, would apply to the overseas markets, the USA in particular where the XJ would represent a greater proportion of overall sales.
YoY sales of the XF to the end of March were recently reported as being up almost 95%, not so much gone off a cliff as gone up a cliff.
As for your beloved 'well-received' E Class, you might want to do a search under Blue Efficiency injector problems - you'll find rather a lot of owners waiting to receive their cars back after breakdowns.
Re: New jobs at Land Rover
As someone who was out of work for 5 months before securing a temporary job (which I'm still doing), I can assure you it isn't worse than not having the job in the first place. In the current climate, any job is better than no job.
On another note, reports suggest Jaguar XF sales figures year-on-year nearly doubled for the XF (2522 in March 2010 versus 1294 in March 2009) and overall sales improved by 1.1%, so I don't see where your claim that sales have "fallen off a cliff" comes from. In any case, the performance of Jaguar is pretty irrelevant as to whether Land Rover should hire contract staff or not - they're different divisions of the company and take their own decisions in this regard based on their own requirements.
Agency jobs or otherwise, the fact they're requiring additional workers can only be a positive sign after a pretty torrid couple of years.
Re: New jobs at Land Rover
Bla, bla bla. This guy is really so funny. He puts so much energy in this relentless attack on JLR and in fact on anything which is British, while he deeply admires every piece of garbage produced in Germany. I just wonder does not he have anything else to do, or is he paid for this?