testosteronepit.com / By Wolf Richter / February 8, 2013, 7:53PM
The preannouncement came Thursday evening: PSA Peugeot Citroën, France’s largest automaker, would have a write-down of €4.7 billion. On top of a hefty operating loss. It would be colossal. An all-time record. Rumors spread immediately that PSA would need a bailout. The second in four months.
PSA passenger car sales in France dropped nearly 17% in 2012 from an already awful 2011. In January they dropped another 16.7%. Sales for all automakers dropped 15%, and PSA’s market share had eroded further. Kia-Hyundai sales jumped 21.2%, the only major automaker with gains. Even Volkswagen Group got clobbered: down 23.9%. PSA isn’t internationally diversified enough. It doesn’t have much in China and nothing in the US, the largest markets in the world, both growing. It’s mired in Europe where auto sales have ground to a halt. It’s bleeding €200 million a month. It’s trying to lay off 8,000 workers and shutter its plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois. And its Banque PSA Finance was bailed out last October with €7 billion in taxpayer money.
The government is so worried that it was actively studying a bailout, sources told the Liberation after the losses were announced. It was just hypothetical. “But if a capital infusion would become inevitable, the state could participate,” the source said. Instantly, a cacophony of discord erupted—within the Socialist government.
Another chapter in the saga of the deindustrialization of France—a process that has afflicted France, like other developed nations, for decades as manufacturing has wandered off to cheaper countries. But now there’s a near national consensus: the state needs to step in and stop it, according to a poll that CSA conducted for Les Echos and the Institut Montaigne….
The same Institut Montaigne that had shocked the establishment last April with a new French Paradox: employees in France were more dissatisfied with their jobs and more stressed at work than their counterparts in the rest of Europe—despite highly protective, “dense and complex” labor laws that allowed the French to work fewer hours, work less often over the weekend, and have a “less sustained pace of work.” And it dared to wonder if the sacrosanct labor laws were still protective, or if they’d become counterproductive even for employees. Gasps all around.
