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Bloomberg
Nissan Motor Co plans to cut as many as 700 workers at one of its US factories, adding slower truck and van sales to the list of woes for a company reeling from a leadership crisis.
The Nissan assembly plant in Canton, Mississippi, will eliminate one shift of Titan and Frontier pickup production, and drop one shift building the NV passenger and cargo vans, according to Lloryn Love-Carter, a Nissan spokeswoman. All direct employees will retain their jobs and only contract workers will be dismissed, she said by phone.
Nissan is approaching the two-month mark since the arrest of its longtime leader Carlos Ghosn, who faces the potential of more jail time in Japan for alleged financial crimes.
Last week, Jose Munoz, Nissan’s former chief performance officer and top executive for North America, abruptly resigned.
The cuts at Nissan add to the industry’s miseries worldwide, ranging from overcapacity in the US, to economic and political headwinds in Europe and falling sales in China, a key engine of growth. Ford Motor Co and Jaguar Land Rover are among the carmakers already cutting thousands of jobs.
Ghosn’s arrest and the accusations of financial misconduct against him have also raised doubts about the future of the world’s largest auto-manufacturing alliance, the partnership of Renault SA, Nissan Motor Co and Mitsubishi Motors Corp that the fallen car titan assembled.
In 2018, Nissan sold a total of 165,635 Frontier and Titan pickups and NV vans in the US.
While the company also exports Canton-built vehicles to other countries and the plant makes other models, that sum is well shy of the factory’s capacity to build 450,000 cars, trucks and vans annually.