April 24 (SeeNews) - Slovenia-based white goods manufacturer Hisense Gorenje is sticking with its plan to build a TV set factory in the country despite the recent announcement of a planned layoff of 2,200 employees, local media reported.
"We will start this project this year," state news agency STA quoted the head of Hisense Gorenje, Lan Lin, as saying on Thursday.
"We are trying to lay off as few people as possible, and after the coronavirus crisis, we will do everything to create more and better jobs," Lan Lin added.
On Tuesday, the head of the trade union at Hisense Gorenje, Zan Zeba, said that the company plans to lay off 2,200 workers this year, including 1,000 people in Slovenia - 700 from the company's main manufacturing facility in the northeastern town of Velenje and a further 300 from the Ljubljana-based administrative unit, Hisense Gorenje Europe.
The move is prompted by the deteriorating financial state of the company, which has seen significantly reduced demand for its output since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease.
Hisense Gorenje, controlled by China's Hisense Group, closed down its production sites in Europe on March 20 to help limit the spread of the disease and protect the health of its employees. The company resumed most of the production operations in Velenje, in the Mora plant in the Czech Republic and the factory in Serbia's Valjevo in the middle of April.
In March 2019, Gorenje said it plans to build a factory for Hisense brand TV sets in Velenje, with the first stage of construction expected to be completed in the autumn of 2020. The factory would manufacture around one million units per year in the first stage. In the next stage, the company plans to increase output capacity to 4 million TV sets per year by 2023, it said at the time.
The new investment was announced after in October 2018, Hisense Luxembourg Home Appliance Holding, a member of China's Hisense Group, acquired a 95.42% stake in Gorenje by purchasing 998,417 Gorenje shares for 12 euro ($13) apiece.
Hisense Gorenje has several production sites located in Slovenia, Serbia and the Czech Republic. Around two-thirds of all employees are based in Slovenia.
In December, local media reported that Gorenje expected to post a 40 million euro loss in 2019 before swinging to a 30 million euro profit in 2020, with the main challenge ahead being improving efficiency and competitiveness.
($=0.928945 euro)