Reports last night that Toyota is cutting a shift making its Auris [aka Corolla] hatchback line at Burnaston in the central England county of Derbyshire stem from an announcement made to workers last month, a Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK spokeswoman said on Friday.
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“Back in July we announced to our employees that, because of the sales situation in Europe we don’t need to produce as many [cars] as we’d originally forecast,” she said.
“To meet that reduction, for a temporary period, we’ll go to one shift on one line. That period’s around about five months but obviously the market changes all the time.”
But, as with recent US production cutbacks, Toyota is not laying off any workers.
She said TMMUK built 277,000 cars last year and will lose around 15,000 vehicles over a five-month Auris cutback.
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By GlobalDataC-segment Auris production will now be single shift while two shifts will continue building the D-segment Avensis.
Affected workers would have “the opportunity for training, to do continuous improvement activity and also focus on quality,” the spokeswoman said.
She said the latest reports apparently rose after a TMC executive in Japan mentioned to an Asian correspondent that TMMUK was cutting the Auris back from two shifts to one “and they assumed we were cutting production by 50%”.
Burnaston exports about 85% of output mainly to Europe where sales in major western markets have softened.
UK total sales to the end of July were off 2.96% to 1,443,576 units while Toyota seven-month volume dipped 7.06% to 74,383 units.
Jato Dynamics data released earlier this month showed Toyota Europe’s sales off 9.2% to 69,004 in July and down 12.2% to 495,657 year to date.
European automakers’ association ACEA has yet to publish July data but said recently that European new passenger car registrations fell 2.0% in the first half of 2008 due to rising inflation and soaring fuel prices. Germany and France were up +3.6% and 4.5% respectively, contrasting with a sizable decline of the Spanish and Italian markets (-17.6% and -11.5%).
In June alone, however, the European market contracted 7.9%.
With the exception of Hungary (-2.2%), Estonia (-11.2%) and Latvia (-32.2%), all new EU member states in the east posted growth in the first half, resulting in a 6.9% increase for the whole region.
The Toyota move is the latest by UK manufacturers attempting to come to terms with nervous markets and retailers attempting to cope with the near collapse of the second-hand business.
TMMUK’s spokeswoman said the decision could be “reviewed at any time because we build based on market demand”.
Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover recently moved workers from its Land Rover/Range Rover SUV plant in Solihull across Birmingham to the Jaguar range to meet soaring demand for the new XF sedan as sales of the SUVs slump.
Toyota has recently revised downwards its sales forecasts for both 2008 and 2009.
