Cuts would be twice as many as the carmaker announced in May and will increase fears of UK losses

The carmaker Nissan plans to cut more than 10,000 jobs around the world as part of efforts to turn itself around, Japanese media have reported.

Nissan announced in May it would cut 4,800 jobs from its global workforce of around 139,000 as it grapples with a fall in profits to a near-decade lowamid “a difficult business environment”.


The cuts are expected to fall mainly in factories outside Japan and will increase fears of job losses at Nissan’s UK operation in Sunderland. Workers are already facing uncertainty due to Brexit and the carmaker’s decision not to build the new X-Trail model in the north-east of England.

Sources cited by Reuters on Wednesday said the company could announce the job losses when it publishes its first-quarter earnings on Thursday. A Nissan spokesman said there would be no comment on the reports about job losses before then.

“We’ve not decided yet what we’ll announce [at the Thursday earnings press conference], and we don’t comment on speculation,” Nissan spokesman Koji Okuda told Agence France-Presse.

The company has been hit by a fall in sales in the United States and Europe and is still reeling after the arrest of former boss Carlos Ghosn on financial misconduct charges.

It has also been facing tensions with its French partner Renault, which owns 43% of the Japanese manufacturer, and is undergoing an overhaul intended to strengthen governance after the Ghosn scandal.

In May, Nissan reported net profits for the fiscal year to March 2019 of 319bn yen ($2.9bn) – the lowest amount since 2009/10 when the company was struggling in the wake of the global financial crisis.

It was a decline of 57% compared with the previous fiscal year and the profit outlook for the current fiscal year was forecast to be even worse at 170bn yen.