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Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.French tire maker Michelin SA was expected to announce job cuts on Wednesday, showing how the crisis in the world automobile industry is hitting big suppliers.
Michelin, which is considered the world's joint biggest tire maker along with Japan's Bridgestone Corp., was planning a meeting with workers' representatives for Wednesday morning, a Michelin spokeswoman said. She declined to give details of the meeting. Unions were expecting job cuts to be announced.
"Will there be a restructuring plan? Yes," said Alain Couderc, the Michelin representative of the Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail, or CFDT, one of France's big union federations. "But we are not sure of the numbers yet."
Mr. Couderc said workers' best hope was that the plan allowed workers to leave over time.
Michelin makes tires for airplanes and specialist vehicles such as tractors as well as for cars, giving it customers outside the ailing automobile industry.
Still, the bulk of its business comes from cars and trucks, both of which are suffering during the global economic downturn. In the first quarter of 2009, Michelin's sales fell 14% to 3.5 billion euros from a year earlier.
Credit: By Sebastian Moffett
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