Volvo axes more than 4,000 jobs as corona crisis hits demand

The company said the pandemic and measures to curb the spread of the new coronavirus had “led to a market situation impacting our industry severely”.

“The effects are expected to be lower demand going forward and we need to continue to adjust our organisation accordingly,” Martin Lundstedt, chief executive of the Volvo Group, said in a statement.

The company said in April it had reduced the number of employees by almost 5,000 in the first quarter, to just under 100,000.

Of the 4,100 job cuts announced on Tuesday, about 15 percent would be made up of consultants and would be carried out in the second half of 2020. Around 1,250 of the positions would be in Sweden.

The truckmaker, which also owns brands such as Renault Trucks and UD Trucks, said the need for “staff reductions would have been higher without various governmental support packages enabling short-term layoffs and other similar measures”.

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Reductions would be carried out across the group but the details would depend on “the local business situation, country legislation and labour market practices”.

In April, the group reported that it had been severely impacted by the pandemic in the first quarter of the year.

Chinese operations started being affected in February and worldwide the group was hit in mid-March when the “global supply chain was disrupted and production halted in most parts of our operations”.

In 2019, Volvo Group delivered 232,769 trucks.