Automaker Fiat canceled some 8,000 layoffs thanks to government help, while Sweden wrestled with how to save 4,500 jobs at Saab after the General Motors’ unit sought protection from creditors.
Friday’s developments — and calls for more help for automakers in the UK and Germany — show the pressure European governments are under to step up bailout packages and save industrial jobs.
Some 8,000 Fiat workers from the Turin headquarters to Sicily will be getting their full paychecks next month after Fiat canceled some scheduled plant closures, kicking up production next month of Fiat’s flagship compact car the Grande Punto, the Fiat Multipla utility vehicle, the Alfa Romeo MiTo and Lancia Ypsilon.
“We are reducing the layoffs,” Fiat spokesman Gualberto Ranieri said on Friday, though some factories will remain on temporary shutdown, including a plant in Naples.
Fiat is Italy’s biggest employer, with some 80,000 workers, more than half of whom have been faced some period of temporary layoff, subsidized by a government-industry fund, since last fall.
In Sweden, the government was looking for ways to save jobs at Saab after the company went into bankruptcy protection. GM, which says it will seek to get the unit ready to sell, and Sweden have not agreed on additional funding to keep Saab viable on its own after the government rejected a bailout request from GM. Saab employs 4,500 workers in 50 countries.
“We explored and will continue to explore all available options for funding and or selling Saab and it was determined a formal restructuring would be the best way to create a truly independent entity that is ready for investment,” Saab’s managing director, Jan Ake Jonsson, said in a statement.
GM’s unit in Germany, Adam Opel GmbH, is also in trouble, and a union official who sits on the supervisory board said it needs some US$4.2 billion — twice as much as previously discussed — to weather the economic crisis.
Armin Schild, a senior member of the IG Metall union, said the sum would allow Adam Opel GmbH to reduce its reliance on troubled US parent GM.
In the UK, auto industry officials launched calls to increase government help as new figures showed new car production fell 58 percent last month from a year ago.
Several car manufacturers, including BMW, Nissan and Honda, have already shed jobs and reduced workers’ hours in response to slowing consumer demand and there are fears the industry might never recover.
In Canada, a local subsidiary of GM requested about US$4.8 billion in government loans on Friday.
In a restructuring proposal submitted to the federal and provincial Ontario governments, GM Canada outlined how it intends to again become viable and repay government loans. The GM plan did not include a specific dollar figure it seeks in bailout funds, but said the amount would be proportionate to the US$30 billion its parent company requested of Washington earlier this week and Industry Minister Tony Clement confirmed that that figure would amount to about US$4.8 billion.
“Now we have to judge … the plans that they have put forward and we’ll be having those discussions over the next month or so,” Clement told reporters.
He said the government is looking at repayable loans, not a grant as some had been speculating.
“We expect the money to come back on commercial terms. We’re sticking to our guns when we mean it’s a loan,” Clement said.
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TALENT FACTOR: The nation’s chip sector would be difficult to replace, but to maintain that advantage, Taiwan must retain skilled workers, an academic said A group of experts on Sunday called on Taiwan to strive to maintain its world-leading position in the semiconductor industry, with a US-China chip dispute expected to continue regardless of who becomes the next US president. Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies director Li Da-jung (李大中) said at a Taipei seminar on global semiconductor security that the relationship between the two superpowers would remain confrontational. There appears to be “no turning back” in US-China relations, as US presidential candidates US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump are both expected to continue Washington’s hawkish stance
RSS