Saab Automobile today decided to suspend production again!

Trollhättan, Sweden: Saab Automobile today decided to temporarily suspend production at its production facility in Trollhättan. The seven-week production stop in April and May has not just affected Saab Automobile, but particularly also its supplier base. While Saab Automobile booked lots of progress and reached agreements with the vast majority of its supplier base, negotiations with a number of suppliers on payment and delivery terms are still ongoing. These negotiations are expected to be finalized shortly.

Saab Automobile is working on a number of initiatives to secure further short and medium-term funding.

As communicated in the press release of May 27th, Saab Automobile anticipated production hiccups in the start-up phase which Saab Automobile has in fact experienced in the last few days. In order to avoid disruptions as a result of irregular inflows of certain components and parts, Saab Automobile has decided to temporary suspend production and will resume production as soon as possible once it has secured a more stable inflow of components and parts together with its supplier base.

Victor Muller, Chairman and CEO of Saab Automobile, said: “We anticipated that we would not see a smooth inflow of supplies as from the day we restarted production, May 27th, and communicated that in our press release of that day. We have a few thousand suppliers worldwide with each of whom we have to reach acceptable terms and conditions to resume production of parts and subsequent deliveries. Many suppliers are located outside Europe and re-stocking inevitably takes time.

“Thus far we have reached agreements with the vast majority of our suppliers and we are confident that we will reach agreement with all remaining suppliers in the coming days, thereby stabilizing our operations and our production in particular. However, it is not to be excluded that we will see production hiccups in the near future until the supply chain is fully back to normal. I reiterate our appreciation for our suppliers who are working with us constructively to come to terms and put our production back on track. At this moment, we have almost 10,000 orders on hand, including those for the Saab 9-4X which is currently being built in Mexico.”