General Motors (hereafter, GM) announced that it will downsize 354 employees at its Opel/Vauxhall plant in Luton, England, as a part of its European restructuring actions. The plant manufactures vans for Opel, Vauxhall, Nissan and Renault.
 
GM has revealed the restructuring actions to cost about 9,000 jobs across Europe in order to reduce output by about 20%. The company had commented that it would require €3.3 billion ($4.9 billion) to restructure its European operations, a part of which will be sourced from the governments. Opel/Vauxhall constitutes about 48,000 employees in Europe, half of them located in Germany.
 
GM’s ownership in Opel took a twist last month when the automaker halted its plan to sell a 55% stake in Opel to Magna (MGA), backed by Russia’s Sberbank, and decided to continue running the unit on its own.
 
GM had been in a dilemma while choosing Magna as the preferred bidder for Opel. The German Government preferred Magna, which had promised not to close any of the four Opel plants in the state. The deal was supported by a €1.5 billion ($2.15 billion) Government-backed bridge loan.
 
However, with Magna GM was afraid of losing Opel’s technology to the Russian car industry. If Magna had won the deal, GM may have lost Russia’s increasingly important market for its models such as Chevrolet. Secondly, it would have lost the Opel engineers, who are integral to GM’s overall strategy. Magna and Sberbank were planning to manufacture Opel cars in Russia with the biggest automaker in the nation – Gaz Group – jointly owned by the tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Avtovaz (partly owned by France’s Renault).
 
A 13-member Opel/Vauxhall Trust Board was formed before GM’s bankruptcy in June to decide the fate of the unit. The German Government held 65% of the unit and GM held 35%. The German Government’s holding has now returned to GM as the automaker repaid €1.5 billion ($2.3 billion) in German government bridge loan, granted earlier this year to keep Opel afloat.
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