Nissan To Announce More Than 10,000 Job Cuts Worldwide Due To Dramatic Drop In Profits

Nissan is reportedly planning to cut twice as many jobs than initially announced earlier this year in a bid to to deal with falling profits, sparking fears of job losses at the company’s UK facilities.

According to a report from Reuters, the Japanese car maker is expected to announce that its first-quarter profit tumbled by around 90 percent, marking this as one of Nissan’s worst quarterly results in a decade.

More than 10,000 job cuts are expected to be announced, which include the 4,800 ones announced back in May, with the majority of them coming from factories outside Japan with low utilization rates, says the report citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

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Nissan declined to comment on the job cuts but confirmed that the 90 percent drop year-on-year in first-quarter operating profit was “broadly accurate”. The company will officially publish its earnings this Thursday.

The additional job cuts have increased fear among the workforce in Nissan’s Sunderland factory in the UK. The factory is already facing uncertainty over Brexit and the company’s decision not to build the next-gen X-Trail there.

Nissan is also struggling to improve its already weak profit margins in the United States, where years of aggressive discounting left the company with a cheapened brand image and falling demand for many of its models.

“Deteriorating performance in the United States is a big issue that we’re facing,” Motoo Nagai, chairman of the automaker’s newly formed audit committee, said.“For a long time we were concerned with increasing volume (sold in the market). We were chasing numbers. Now it’s time to enhance the brand,” he said.

Other factories that could be affected from the cuts could include the under-utilized facilities in India and Brazil, according to another source.