A worker assembles a car at Kaluga plant of Volkswagen.
Photo: Dmitry Lebedev
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Volkswagen Slashes Russia’s Production Target
Right after Renault, Volkswagen has announced the planned reduction in output of its Russia’s plant. The assembly at Kaluga facility will be 13 percent below the earlier plans. The analysts forecast that selling even those 100,000 cars won’t be easy in the crisis environment.
Volkswagen Group Rus General Director Martin Jahn announced yesterday that the Kaluga carmaker of the consortium will assemble no more than 100,000 cars in 2009. The previous plans were to reach the production of 115,000 and even of 150,000 should the market environment be promising. But those hopes haven’t materialized and the production target of Kaluga plant has been slashed by 13 percent at the minimum.
In Kalgua, VW assembles three models of Skoda (Octavia, Octavia Tour and Fabia) and three models of Volkswagen (Passat, Jetta and Tiguan).
The announced reduction in production target by Volkswagen is the second statement about the planned decline in the output of Russia’s facility of nonresident carmaker during a week. Past Friday, French Renault slashed by 5.75 percent the 2008 production target of its Avtoframos plant in Moscow. Due to the ailing demand for the basic model, the production line of Avtoframos will be put to a stand for 14 working days in December. In Russia’s office of Renault, they make no forecasts for 2009.
Three more plants of foreign automobile majors are working in Russia – Ford-Vsevolozhsk facility in the Leningrad Region and the plants of Toyota and General Motors (GM) in St. Petersburg. According to Ford Russia representative Ekaterina Kulinenko, the consortium hasn’t yet decided to trim the output at Ford-Vsevolozhsk, but it is monitoring the situation and may announce the reduction in future.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 04, 2008
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