Another British luxury car maker is scaling back some of its production to match falling demand.
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Bentley confirmed on Friday that it is cutting Continental production from 172 to 140 cars a week by moving approximately 1,400 workers from their present full-time four-day week (Fridays had been kept for overtime) to three day shifts.
The Volkswagen-owned luxury car maker is following Land Rover, which last week announced similar shift cuts for some model lines
As at Land Rover, though, no one is being laid off, Bentley’s director of corporate & government affairs, Michael Hawes, told just-auto. The automaker operates a time-banking system and workers would effectively “owe us a shift” to be worked when full production resumes.
He insisted there were no compulsory redundancies and that workers would continue to get their full pay.
He could not say when an improvement was expected but noted that Bentley thought the current difficult economic climate would continue into 2009.
“We’re reducing supply because we don’t want to force the market, we can’t afford to do that with the brand.
“So we are taking the action now so that, when the market does turn, we can increase production and don’t have stock sitting in dealer showrooms.
Hawes said Bentley’s first half sales were down about 16%.
“We’ve been reviewing the situation for the last 12 months,” he said. “Our initial response was to move production allocation away from declining markets such as the US and parts of Europe into growing markets like China and the Middle East.
“Second step was to take some volume out [of production], though only about 300 units in the first part of this year.
Now, he added, things are “clearly getting tougher”.
SMMT Ausgust statistics released yesterday showed Bentley’s UK sales dropped 31% to 49 units last month and were off 17.9% to 1,206 year to date.
“The UK market, in particular, has turned in the last couple of months and that’s been seen across the board, so we want to take action now, and action that will put us in a good position for the foreseeable [future],” Hawes said.
“We’ve decided to reduce production volume further and overall for the year will be about 15% down.
“Last year we sold 10,000 cars and that’s the number we sold. [This year] we’ll be producing around 8,500.”
Hawes noted that Bentley employs over 4,000 in total and that other parts of the automaker were “working very, very hard indeed, especially in terms of engineering and R&D” where investment was continuing.
“We’re spending more at the moment than we have done at any time in the past.”
Current cuts were “just in production”.
Graeme Roberts
