Nissan says Sunderland car plant is uncompetitive
The carmaker has admitted that Nissan Sunderland, the country's largest car plant, is uncompetitive because of high energy costs and a deteriorating automotive supply chain in Britain.
At the formal unveiling of a reborn alliance between the Japanese company and its longstanding partner, Renault, executives at Nissan said the Sunderland plant needed government support, and that an electric replacement for the old Micra model aimed at Nissan carbuyers in Europe would be built at Renault's new ElectriCity manufacturing complex in northern France.
In London to unveil a simplified and equalized cross-shareholding between Renault and Nissan, Makoto Uchida, Nissan's global chief executive, praised the Sunderland factory as a very important and important part of the company's global chief executive, said that the UK is challenging and we need a supplier base. Ashwani Gupta, chief operating officer, said that Nissan Sunderland's future depended on three issues: making it more attractive with the help of government support, reducing the cost of manufacturing against rising energy costs that are making it more expensive than peer factories on the Continent, and localisation of a supply chain to reduce the cost of shipping components.
Asked whether Sunderland could regain its competitiveness as a car plant worth investing in, Gupta said: That is a question that needs to be answered. He said that the UK does not have a big automotive industry and that it could regain its competitiveness because of the support of government. He declined to comment on what form of support that would take, other than to say that the government needed to restore the UK's industrial base.
He admitted that the amount of domestic UK supply chain input into the plant had fallen to historic lows. He said it is difficult to get to 40 per cent. He said that Sunderland had to be competitive if it didn't regain its competitiveness. In 2016, the year Britons voted to secede from the EU, the Sunderland factory, which employs more than 7,000 people, is producing more than 500,000 cars a year. That has more than halved and only 238,000 cars have been rolled off its assembly lines last year. At present, it produces the Qashqai, Britain bestselling car, Juke, a smaller version of that vehicle, and the all-electric Nissan Leaf.
The relationship between the two carmakers is a moot point in the future of Nissan Sunderland. In 2015, even before the toppling of Carlos Ghosn, creator of the Renault-Nissan alliance and former chief executive who is now a fugitive from Japanese authorities, relations between the companies were at a turning point, with Emmanuel Macron, a young and ambitious French economics minister, lobbying for Renault to take more control of Nissan. Nissan spokesman said that part of Macron's plan was to shut down Nissan Sunderland and return production to France to fill Renault's under-utilised factories on the Continent.