Jaguar Land Rover has announced that 300 permanent management jobs and 150 salaried agency workers will go in the latest round of redundancies. This is an effort to reduce costs with the credit crunch in full swing and general car sales in decline.
This is despite latest SMMT figures showing an increase in Jaguar Cars annual sales for 2008, largely due to the introduction of the Jaguar XF. It is expected the majority of the losses will be on the Land Rover side due to the terrible 2008 Land Rover performance (30% down), and caused by its lack of variety in a model range featuring purely 4x4's that have lost popularity due to the large size and weight, poor economy and environmental impact.
Jaguars corporate director Don Hume was quoted as saying "Our employees understand that Jaguar Land Rover functions as one company and that this move will help both companies’ positioning as we move forward"
It seems like Jaguar is suffering from its ties to Land Rover, as individually Jaguar is expected to continue its strong sales, after announcing a range of new power plants in the Jaguar XJ, the XF and the Jaguar XK range - more on those in the next post.
