Another car bailout looming?

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From the AFR:

A strategic car parts maker, Autodom, has indefinitely shut plants in Melbourne and Adelaide that employ about 400 workers, raising the prospect of production halts at the car assembly plants of Ford Australia and GM Holden.

…Chief executive Calvin Stead used a statement to express disappointment at the “lack of support” from key players in the industry that could potentially result in significant direct costs to the industry and government “should the business fail completely.”:

Mr Stead said the company had high fixed costs and that could not be easily be aligned with the local car makers having cut their production volumes by half over the past four years.

That’s got bailout written all over it.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.