Jaguar Land Rover is to cut 4,000 jobs over the next two years as the carmaker contends with Chinese competition, US tariffs and the shift to electric vehicles, Hiru News and the Daily Mirror reported, both carrying BBC copy.
The cuts will mostly affect the company’s UK head office. JLR employs 43,000 people worldwide.
Chief executive PB Balaji said the firm was “committed to supporting everyone with care, fairness and respect” through the redundancy process, adding that the industry “faces significant challenges, with technological change amidst intense competition and ongoing geo-political uncertainty.”
How the cuts will be made
JLR is seeking voluntary redundancies, with a window open until 4 October, but has said it will impose compulsory redundancies on less generous terms if necessary. Affected staff will be emailed in the coming days. The company is targeting savings of £1.7 billion over two years.
What went wrong
A cyber-attack last year forced JLR to halt production for more than a month, compounding longer-running problems. In results for the year to the end of March, the company said US tariffs and the cyber-attack were the main reasons sales slumped by a fifth, to £22.9 billion from £29 billion.
The company has been losing sales to Chinese rivals in a market it had originally treated as a growth opportunity rather than a source of competition. Unlike many competitors, it has no US factory, leaving it exposed to tariffs.
Ian Robertson, a former BMW director, told the BBC that JLR should have followed rivals into US manufacturing — BMW at Spartanburg, Mercedes at Tuscaloosa — and had been “somewhat late to the party” on electric vehicles. Jaguar launched the electric I-PACE in 2018; an electric Range Rover announced last week is its first EV launch since.
Political fallout
David Bailey, business and economics professor at Birmingham University, called JLR “as strategically important as it gets for the UK economy” and “the centre of our automotive industry.”
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds would meet the company early in the week, but ruled out “any form of bailout.” Business and trade committee chair Liam Byrne called the cuts a “body blow for workers, families and communities across the West Midlands.” Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said it “cannot be acceptable that workers again are made to pay the price for failings not of their making.”
Some have blamed the wider UK car industry’s difficulties on the zero emission vehicle mandate, which requires all new UK car and van sales to be zero emission by 2035 but does not apply to cars sold overseas, where JLR earns most of its revenue.
