(Japan Factories Take Steps to Resume Production)"Nissan Motor said on Sunday that it planned to restart production this week at five of its six Japanese plants that have been idled since an earthquake and tsunami pummeled the country on March 11. The announcement was among a handful of encouraging signs for Japan’s economy, the world’s third largest, which has been staggered by the natural disasters and the subsequent crisis the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
The Sony Corporation, Japan’s largest exporter of consumer electronics, said Sunday that it was preparing in days to reopen a plant that makes rechargeable batteries in Northern Japan.
Honda and Toyota have said that they are ramping up production at factories across Japan, moves likely to ease the shortages of parts and supplies that have disrupted automakers worldwide.
Although the earthquake and tsunami destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and killed more than 8,000 people, they did not cause serious damage in most of Japan’s auto factories. But rolling blackouts and fuel shortages forced manufacturers to curtail production, disrupting the supply chain so severely that other automakers were compelled to idle plants in places as far away as Spain and Louisiana.
Now, Japanese manufacturers are slowly increasing output. Toyota, which halted manufacturing at all its Japanese plants and subsidiaries after the quake, has already restarted production of replacement parts at seven plants beyond the region hit hardest by the earthquake and tsunami.
Four plants operated by Toyota subsidiaries, two of which build models for Toyota dealers in North America, were closer to the epicenter and more directly affected. They remain idle.
Company officials said that Toyota planned to resume building parts for overseas factories on Monday. A Toyota spokesman in New York, Javier Moreno, said the company was still evaluating its supply chain in Japan but that production of replacement parts was “going well.”
Nissan said it planned to resume making parts for overseas production and for repairs at the Japanese factories on Tuesday. Vehicle assembly is scheduled to resume Thursday.
The plants build several models for the Infiniti brand, as well as the Nissan Rogue, Murano, 370Z and GT-R.
But company officials warned that a plant that builds the engines for many of its vehicles would remain down indefinitely. Nissan asked employees at the engine plant, in Iwaki, a city near the disabled Fukushima nuclear reactor, to spend their down time volunteering in community restoration efforts.
“With aftershocks still heavily impacting the region and infrastructure reestablishment still continuing, restoration is expected to take longer than the other plants,” Nissan said in a statement from its headquarters in Yokohama.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, the chief executive of General Motors has told employees worldwide to curtail nonessential spending and travel while the company assesses the disaster’s effects on operations. The executive, Daniel F. Akerson, notified workers of the temporary cut by e-mail, a company spokesman, Klaus-Peter Martin, confirmed.
Mr. Martin also said that G.M. would halt production Monday at a plant in Zaragoza, Spain, and cancel two shifts Monday and Tuesday in Eisenach, Germany, because of a shortage of parts made in Japan. The plants build models for G.M.’s Opel brand in Europe.
G.M. previously said it would shut a pickup truck plant in Shreveport, La., for at least a week starting Monday. The company is sending parts that would have gone to that plant elsewhere so it can continue building more popular models.
While the crises have hobbled Japan’s economy in the short term, and the cost of rebuilding is expected to soar into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the World Bank said in a report to be released Monday that it expected only a temporary setback for economic growth in East Asia.
The bank said growth would begin to pick up in the second half of this year, as Japan’s rebuilding effort got fully under way. Japan’s experience “suggests an accelerated reconstruction effort, and the short term impact on the economies of developing East Asia is likely to be limited,” it said.
The bank said the report had been completed before the earthquake, but was revised to account for the likely impact of the quake and its aftermath.
“Clearly given Japan’s importance in East Asia, the tragic events unfolding will be felt in the region,” Vikram Nehru, World Bank chief economist for the East Asia and Pacific region, said in the report.
“At this stage, we expect the economic impact of this disaster on the East Asian region to be fairly short-lived,” Mr. Nehru said. “In the immediate future the biggest impact will be in terms of trade and finance. We expect growth in Japan will pick up as reconstruction efforts accelerate.”
Em: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/busin ... &emc=tha25
