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PARIS : The global financial storm ravaged the motor industry on Friday, forcing car and truck firms on three continents to announce job losses, production cuts, temporary plant closures and plunging orders.
In the United States, Chrysler LLC announced the loss of 5,000 temporary and administrative jobs by the end of the year in the face of intense pressure on the auto industry from global economic and credit woes.
Company spokesman David Elshoff told AFP the firm would lose 25 percent of "white-collar and supplemental workforce positions", probably from every Chrysler facility around the world.
In France, Renault said it would shutter almost all of its French and some of its foreign factories for a couple of weeks, while PSA Peugeot-Citroen said it would slash production by 30 percent and suspend workers.
The motoring sector employs, directly or indirectly, 10 percent of the French workforce, and production cuts were seen as an early sign that the economy is on the verge of a crippling recession.
The decisions came against a dramatic drop in car sales, which Peugeot estimated at 17-percent in Western Europe in the fourth quarter and at eight percent for the year as a whole.
"We have reacted very quickly in taking exceptional measures to reduce production, even if logically that will damage our operating margin in 2008," PSA-Peugeot Citroen chairman Christian Streiff said in a statement.
"The production cuts will thus be massive in the fourth quarter, because it's essential that the group be well-placed to take on 2009."
Separately, Peugeot executives confirmed to AFP that the slowdown would amount to a 30 percent production cut and that plants in France would lose between two and 16 days of work each in the last three months of 2008.
There would also be cut-backs at Peugeot's sites in Madrid and Vigo in Spain and at Trnava, in Slovakia, they said. The firm now expects to see sales fall by 3.5 percent this year, after earlier hoping for a 5.0 percent increase.
A Renault spokesman said production would be halted for between one and two weeks in almost all of its major French plants and between one and four days at Bursa in Turkey, a Moscow plant and at Novo Mesto in Slovenia.
"We are in a period when, without doubt, markets are collapsing and to avoid a brutal degradation in the company's situation, we have to manage stocks in an extremely tight way," said the spokesman, insisting the closures are temporary.
The firm has already announced 4,900 job cuts and said Thursday that production would be cut 20 percent in the final three months of the year because of falling sales.
The cut-backs have already triggered labour disputes, and the CGT union promised more protests at the troubled Sandouville plant in northern France.
Renault said that if conditions do not worsen further it still expects a slight rise in the group's sales over 2007.
On the other side of the Rhine in Germany, Volkswagen did not share the gloom of its French competitors, and maintained its 2008 sales projection.
Volkswagen delivered 4.8 million vehicles worldwide in the first nine months of the year, an increase of 3.9 percent from the equivalent figure in 2007, a statement issued by the biggest European carmaker said.
"We maintain our objective of selling more cars in 2008 than in 2007," sales director Detlef Wittig was quoted as saying. In addition to the Volkswagen brand, the VW group also owns Seat, Skoda and Audi.
Trading in shares Italian in auto group Fiat was suspended in Milan after the stock had collapsed by 11.09 percent to 5.67 euros, one day after it fell by more than eight percent after issuing its own profit warning.
Toyota Motor Corp. revealed that its global sales fell 96,000 units, or more than four percent, to 2.236 million vehicles in the quarter to September, the first quarterly drop in seven years.
The year-on-year decline, which was confirmed by a company spokeswoman, includes group affiliates Daihatsu and Hino.
And with truck sales a key indicator of the health of the economy, Swedish maker Scania said orders in western Europe fell 69 percent in the third quarter and rival Volvo said it had seen a 55 percent fall.
Volvo chief executive Leif Johansson said that after record sales and profits in the first two quarters, demand for heavy trucks had slowed far faster than expected because of the impact of the global crisis.
It said truck orders had fallen 41 percent overall. Western Europe was down 69 percent and Eastern Europe, hitherto a growth market, fell 45 percent.
- AFP /ls
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