The Range Rover Sport - Sales increase means more jobs in Solihull
Land Rover are recruiting 275 new workers at Solihull – an increase of 5.5% in the workforce – to cope with a bulging order book.
It’s less than a year since we were busy reporting that Jaguar Land Rover were expecting to have to make some pretty severe job cuts. Tata had seen losses of over £300 million since buying JLR from Ford in 2008, and the decimation of sales brought about by the recession were making things very difficult for JLR, despite probably the best line-up of cars they’ve ever had.
But much has changed in the last year. Sales have gone through the roof for both Jaguar and Land Rover and seem set to keep rising so strong is the product. Jaguar have seen sales of the XF rise by 95% and Land Rover have seen overall sales jump by a quite incredible 89%. That’s an 89% increase for a range of cars pilloried by the Environ-Mentalists as planet killers and whose fuel economy – although improving – is hardly for the budget conscious.
Which does say a lot for a range of cars that shouldn’t have a prayer of selling in a climate-change, recession-hit world. But Land Rover’s 2010 MY product has come on leaps and bounds, as we discovered when we reviewed the Range Rover Sport recently.
So with all this sales success there’s only one problem – keeping up with the order book. So Land Rover are on the hunt for 275 new members of staff (agency staff, admittedly – sensible to hedge bets at this stage of the cycle) for the Solihull plant. That’s the Solihull plant that’s set to close in 2014, but for now it’s about hitting production targets and fulfilling orders.
Good News all round.
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