Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. will drastically reduce the number of new graduates they hire in spring 2010 as automakers reel from the global sales slump and sharp appreciation of the yen, company officials said Thursday.
Nissan, which recently announced 20,000 job cuts and projected huge losses for the current business year through next month, will cut the number of new graduates that it will employ in spring 2010 to several dozen, officials said. This spring, the automaker plans to employ about 580 new graduates.
Earlier in the day, Honda also said it will slash the number of new graduates it will hire by 40 percent from a total of 1,490 this April to 890 in spring 2010. Last month, Japan's second-largest automaker lowered its earnings projection for the year for the fourth time.
The scale of the cut in new graduate hiring at Nissan will be larger than in spring 2000, when it hired 157 people even at a time when it was experiencing severe financial difficulties.
On Monday, Japan's third-largest automaker said it will cut its worldwide workforce by 8.5 percent, including 12,000 job cuts in Japan. It slashed its earnings forecasts for fiscal 2008 to a group net loss of ¥265 billion, its first red ink since Carlos Ghosn joined its management a decade ago.