“Saab’s way of communicating is a catastrophe,” FKG managing director Sven-Ake Berglie said this week in Sweden. “They must have seen this [the cessation of parts shipments] coming up before in December already, but they did not say anything.” And: “When the suppliers did not get paid, Saab said it was a few [of them] and it was due to the [fact] the suppliers wanted improved payment terms, which was a complete lie.” Not perhaps the best endorsement of an automaker customer by the head of its supplier group. And still the assembly line lies silent.
The ‘temporary glitch’ of three weeks ago has now turned into a saga with the makings of a Jolly Good Yarn. The Russians are involved, the Chinese might be while the banking suits of Luxembourg and Swedish bureaucrats ponder details.
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“It is a process that takes an enormous amount of time, it is in the hands of the EIB [and] when they come back we don’t know,” a Saab spokesman said today. “We would rather have had a situation before Easter [where we] could have enjoyed a weekend knowing we have secured financing and could think of starting production.”
I’m sure the furloughed assembly line workers and the guys who make the parts would also like some fast-tracking to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Doesn’t look like they’re getting it this week.
It’s now about five weeks since that earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The media’s moved on from breathless wall-to-wall daily coverage but the affected area still looks like a war zone and it’s a hard heart that wouldn’t be affected by the pictures of people still living in school gyms and picking through bins of mud-covered personal effects for a scrap of photo album. And there are the bereaved, the orphaned children (if you’ve no relatives left, the future is bleak as there’s not much of a formal adoption system in family-focused Japan), and a trashed nuclear plant still sending geiger counters off the scale.
On the other hand, there are immaculately cleared streets between the rubble, a buckled highway restored and a damaged airport repaired – in the time it would take a British local authority to form a committee to consider the problem – while many factories are now back producing goods, albeit at reduced rate. That includes the auto industry where most plants were back on line daily this week, albeit at about half normal rate. The ripple effect continued this week, though, with big Toyota volume cuts here in the UK, and in North America and China and the automaker is not alone. Despite the good news, April sales in Japan are, unsurprisingly, expected to slump.
There’s more good news here in Britain as a busy week, including the Shanghai show, draws to a close. Our post-snowy-winter roads may still look like river beds in many places but an unseasonably warm spell has coaxed summer flowers out in spring, packed south coast beaches and coincided nicely with a run of Easter and associated Bank Holidays off we’re all looking forward to – including one for the wedding of a nice young couple called William and Kate.
If you are also so lucky, enjoy. We’ll see you Tuesday…
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
