Corus, JLR act to cut costs

London, Oct 17 (PTI) Two Tata Group companies -- steel firm Corus and car maker Jaguar Land Rover -- have announced different steps to reduce costs in the wake of fall in demand for the alloy and drop in auto sales.

Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus is cutting production by 20
percent across all its operations in response to a drop in
demand in automotive, construction and engineering sectors,
while premium car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover have
announced job losses.

Corus will reduce output at its main sites of Port
Talbot, Scunthorpe, Teesside and Rotherham in the U.K. and
IJmuiden in the Netherlands till the end of the year when it
will review output.

"The decision is aimed at aligning steel production with
demand, which is now affected by the consequences of the
global financial crisis," the company said.

The production cuts mark the first significant scaleback
by Britain's main steelmaker for several years. No job cuts or
layoffs are planned among Corus's 24,400 British workforce,
nor among its 11,700 workers in the Netherlands.

Tata Steel, which owns Corus, said that it did not plan
to make cuts outside its European operations.

On other hand, Jaguar Land Rover, the premium carmaker
owned by Group company Tata Motors, is to make 198 employees
redundant at its plants in Birmingham, Solihull and
Merseyside.

Jaguar Land Rover, which employs 15,000 people in
Britain, said that it would seek to make the cuts through
voluntary redundancies.

Compared with this time last year, car sales in Britain
have tumbled by more than a fifth. Jaguar insisted, however,
that its job losses were unrelated to the current economic
gloom.

A spokesman said that it was part of an "ongoing drive to
improve efficiency", and that similar cuts had been made in
previous years.

"It is a small redundancy programme and it affects 198
staff across all our manufacturing sites," he said. Jaguar
Land Rover has announced measures to limit overproduction,
including four-day weeks and temporary closures of some
plants.

The company said that the move was an efficiency drive
rather than a response to the poor car market.

Although Jaguar has experienced a slight sales bounce
with its new XF model, the Land Rover division has suffered a
significant slide in sales. Last month sales fell 49 percent
compared to that in September last year.

Jaguar Land Rover's factories are working only four days
a week or are facing production cuts. This month the Halewood
plant on Merseyside, which makes X-type Jaguar and Land Rover
Freelander, will not operate for a week. The Vauxall plant
near by at Ellesmere Port is closed to reduce output.

This week, official figures showed that the total number
of unemployed people in Britain had risen to 1.79 million, the
highest since March 1998.

Analysts have predicted that two million people could be
out of work by Christmas and the number of jobless would
exceed 2.5 million next year. The figures from the Office for
National Statistics also showed that 1,47,000 people were made
redundant in the three months to August.

The British government has made an extra 100 million
pounds available for retraining workers in anticipation of a
sharp rise in job losses as the result of a recession. PTI HSR