Jaguar Land Rover to drop 2,000 staff globally – report

Jaguar Land Rover has announced that it will be cutting 2,000 salaried jobs from its global workforce, Reuters reported, shortly after announcing its plan to turn Jaguar’s model line-up fully electric by 2025, as part of the group’s new Reimagine strategy under new boss Thierry Bolloré.

“The full review of the Jaguar Land Rover organisation is already underway. We anticipate a net reduction of around 2,000 people from our global salaried workforce in the next financial year,” the automaker said in an e-mailed statement sighted by Reuters. These cuts involved non-factory jobs, and the organisational review did not affect hourly-paid manufacturing employees, it added.

The downsizing of staff is related to the company’s ongoing cost-cutting and restructuring exercise, known as Project Charge+ through 2020, which itself is the subsequent phase of Project Charge, says Autocar. The British automaker saw a drop in sales of 23.6% for 2020, which followed a record £422 million (RM2.28 billion) in losses for 2019.

The Reimagine strategy announced earlier this week will see Jaguar positioned more distinctly from the Land Rover product line, as the former will see future models employ a pure electric drive architecture unique to the brand. This means Jaguar will no longer use the Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA), spelling the end of development of what was to be the successor to the X351, though the XJ nameplate will live on.

The shift suggests that Jaguar will move away from SUV-styled models, leaving that genre to Land Rover, with Jaguar’s current SUV range competing with Land Rover products cited as the reason for the re-alignment, said Autocar. Bolloré also did not rule out future Jaguar sports cars, which will be fully electric given the brand’s newly adopted direction.

This leaves the MLA archictecture to Land Rover, which will use the platform for the upcoming, fifth-generation Range Rover, and will also adopt a “pure electric biased” Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) that will support advanced electrification, which will go towards the SUV maker’s plans to debut six new fully electric models in the next five years.

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