Car manufacturer General Motors Holden (GM) yesterday announced that 500 jobs would be axed from its plants in Australia, blaming the strength of the local dollar for squeezing sales.
Of the job cuts, 400 will be made in Adelaide, where production will be scaled back from 400 cars a day to 335.
Another 100 jobs will go among product development staff in Melbourne.
“This is a very difficult decision because people and their families are involved,” chairman Mike Devereux said. “But to protect the long-term future of Holden we have been forced to take these actions and this restructure will better align Holden with projected future volume and workload.”
The company said the cuts were “due primarily to a reduction in demand for the locally made Cruze small car led by a high Australian dollar, combined with one of the most open and competitive car markets in the world.”
“The appreciation of the currency means that making things in this country is 60 percent more expensive than it was 10 years ago. The currency is the strongest it’s been in more than 30 years,” Devereux said.
“We have made significant productivity gains, but are witnessing a structural shift in the Australian market which favors importers due to a sustained high Australian dollar and extremely low tariffs. This perfect storm of economic conditions has put intense pressure on the local industry,” he said.
The GM subsidiary, which employs about 4,000 people in Australia, last year slashed its workforce by about 170, again citing a strong Australian dollar and slow car sales.
The government, which handed Holden a A$275 million (US$285 million) lifeline last year to keep its plants open amid fears it would pull out of Australia, said it was disappointed with the news.
“The Gillard government remains committed to the Australian automotive sector and the manufacturing sector more broadly,” acting Australian Minister for Climate Change, Industry and Innovation Gary Gray said.
“Car manufacturing is an integral part of the Australian economy, with about 250,000 people employed in the sector and associated industries,” he added.
Australia’s auto industry is struggling with the effects of the high local dollar, which has traded near or above parity with the greenback for more than two years, squeezing exports and compounding rising production costs.
Though Australia did not go into recession during the global financial crisis, domestic confidence has failed to return to pre-crisis levels, also hitting car sales.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS