Nissan has announced it will stop production of Micra and Note models in Sunderland for two weeks.
In keeping with other car manufacturers facing steep downturns, Nissan’s Sunderland output will halt on Monday, 27 October, and resume in limited form on November 10. Production will be three days a week, and operating at 90 percent of the normal speed, to slow output in-line with demand.
The Sunderland site is the UK’s largest automobile manufacturing site, and will affect around 800 employees, though their wages will not be reduced. During the two-week pause in production they will attend training.
The move was described as a “quite dramatic and very real downturn” by Nissan’s Senior Vice President for manufacturing in Europe, Trevor Mann. "This situation has been caused by the global economic downturn - nobody is immune," Mann said, though stated that he "could not imagine a scenario" in which the plant would make compulsory redundancies.
Though the company had been "bang on [its] sales plan to the end of August," the sales of Micra and Note models was down 20 percent in the UK and 30 percent in Spain. Production of newer model Qashqai is largely unaffected by the downturn, and production will continue as usual, save the Saturday overtime shift which has been cancelled.
Nissan stocks were up 4.17 percent at 549 yen per share.