Ford Restarts Production in Russia

Following a well-deserved summer holiday, more or less pushed by the global economic chaos, Ford's Russian plant is restarting production and hopes for better times in the upcoming months. The St. Petersburg facility, which is building the Ford Focus and Ford Mondeo, halted operations on July 20 during difficult times in Russia where the auto sector is almost at half compared to last year's level.

Back in April, Ford announced that it could cut production of Mondeo and Focus in the wake of the recession which collapsed new car sales and forced local carmakers to apply a series of unprecedented cost-cutting measures, including job cuts and production halts.

"As we forecast continuing overall declines in sales of new cars on the Russian market, Ford ... is proposing to cut the work week to four days, as we did at our European plants," Ford spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko was quoted as saying back in April.

Obviously, such a measure led to an avalanche of criticism from unions who expressed their disapproval towards a potential work week cut.

"The union committee believes the company is conducting its business in bad faith in the financial crisis by imposing a partial work week, and (the union) retains the right to appeal to the regional government ... to investigate the situation at the plant," the union said.

Still, Ford has high expectations from Russia and sees the restart of production as a positive sign given the fact that many automakers across the country decided to extend the summer holiday as their inventories are still full of unsold cars.