TU-TESL

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According to overseas media reports, under the background of global economic downturn, reduced demand for new cars and structural reform of the automobile industry, the large Japanese, American and European automobile enterprises dominated by general motors of the United States have successively announced layoffs plans, with a total number of more than 70000 people. After the subprime crisis in the United States, the auto industry has laid off more than 100000 people, and the number of layoffs is close to that. GM, for example, closed three U.S. plants, seven globally and cut 14000 people. Ford also announced a 12, 000 cut in workers, and in June announced the closure of five other factories in Europe. Nissan earlier announced that it would cut 125, 000 people in its manufacturing sector. The number of employees of major Japanese, American and European car companies has continued to grow since 2009, with about 2.4 million employees. In 2018, it began to decline slightly. If more than 70000 people are laid off this time, the number of layoffs will account for about 4% of the total number of employees. According to the analysis, one of the background for the decision of layoff is the change of new car market. In 2018, global new car sales decreased by 0.5% compared with the previous year, to 95.81 million. New car sales in developed countries in Japan, the United States and Europe began to decline after peaking. In 2019, new car sales in the United States decreased by 3% compared with the previous year, while in Europe, they decreased by 1% compared with the previous year. In fact, affected by the financial crisis around 2009, despite the decline in global new car sales, vehicle companies were optimistic about the market potential of emerging countries at that time, and then successively expanded their investment in emerging markets. Global automobile production continued to grow in 2010-2017. In 2018, global auto production turned around, down 1.1% from the previous year. At that time, Itochu commercial researcher once said that "the large-scale traditional production mode has reached the limit, and there will be more and more layoffs for the purpose of reducing production capacity in the future.". On the other hand, the development of new generation automobile technology, such as chemical industry, has also accelerated the structural reform of automobile manufacturing system. The total number of parts of pure electric vehicles is 30% less than that of traditional vehicles, and the number of workers needed to produce the final assembly is also reduced. For example, after starting to produce pure electric vehicles in German factories, 7000-8000 jobs will be cut by 2023. VW now plans to increase the proportion of all electric vehicles to 40% of its global sales by 2030. The other purpose of downsizing is to ensure the investment in research and development of new generation technology, and the vehicle enterprises need to raise corresponding funds. Daimler group currently spends 1% of its annual revenue on pure electric vehicle research and development. GM also invested 1 billion 100 million US dollars (7 billion 700 million yuan) in its R & D companies as it cut staff. In order to improve efficiency, the fixed cost of 300 billion yen (20.4 billion yuan) was cut, while the development cost increased by 1%. According to the survey of relevant institutions, the investment scale of the automobile industry in the next five years will reach 225 billion US dollars (about 1.6 trillion yuan), and the investment scale of automatic driving will reach 50 billion US dollars (about 350 billion yuan). However, the pure electric vehicle business will not be able to generate benefits immediately. For example, the low-cost pure electric vehicle that Renault plans to launch in the first half of 2020 has a minimum price of 1 million yen (about 68000 yuan). That is to say, automobile enterprises may promote the popularization of pure electric vehicles by prolonging the recovery cycle of investment cost.