Jaguar Land Rover announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs in a bid to cope with the financial hit from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The British carmaker reported a £422 million ($531 million) pre-tax loss in the year to March, in addition to a £500 million ($629 million) pre-tax loss in last year’s final quarter.
Jaguar Land Rover will cut 1,100 temporary jobs in the coming months as they are raising their cost-cutting target for next year by £1 billion to £5 billion ($6.3 billion). The new cuts come on top of the 5,000 jobs axed by the company last year.
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The latest job cuts are “another devastating blow for our auto sector and the communities that rely on them for jobs”, said Unite Union, adding that 400 positions would be lost at JLR’s biggest factory, at Solihull, and the rest will spread across the rest of their sites.
The company said that they have received just 22,000 orders for the new Land Rover Defender, a model JLR hopes to sell in large volumes. That figure is disappointing according to analysts who spoke to Financial Times, adding that it’s only slightly higher than the number of old Defenders sold in their final year of production, back in 2016.
The automaker has started re-opening factories in the UK and Europe, but many of them are running at low capacity. JLR’s Castle Bromwich plant remains closed. “The company plans to resume production gradually to meet recovering demand,” JLR said in a statement, adding that Solihull and Halewood are open, as does their Slovakian factory.
