Nissan Motor president Carlos Ghosn has said the automaker was unlikely to resume recuiting staff in Japan until exports recovered and that automakers were still struggling to adapt to the yen’s sharp appreciation.
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”For the moment, the main weight over hiring again would be the recovery of the export business,” Ghosn said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, according to Kyodo News.
”It takes some time before you adjust to this new reality,” he said, citing the US dollar’s decline to the JPY90 zone following last year’s financial crisis from an average around the JPY110 range for the past decade.
The dollar’s weakness has accelerated in recent weeks, hitting a 10-month low just above JPY88 earlier this month in Tokyo. A stronger yen erodes the profits that Japanese exporters make abroad.
Ghosn said the Japanese market was showing nascent signs of recovery on the back of recent government tax breaks and subsidies to promote the purchase of fuel-efficient cars, according to the news agency report.
”So far, we are doing much better as an industry,” he said.
Toyota Motor and Mitsubishi Motors have said they would resume hiring temporary workers amid a recent boost in sales, but Nissan remained cautious with Ghosn saying both domestic demand and exports would need to recover to make that decision.
Earlier this year, Japan’s third-largest automaker announced it would cut 20,000 jobs worldwide by the end of March next year, including 12,000 jobs in Japan, as it fell deeply into the red for the first time since Ghosn joined Nissan’s management a decade ago.
