Takashi Sonobe described the plan as "a dynamic transparent process which will lead to sustainable growth and regain the trust of our customers." He continued by saying: "With our new quality and design standards we will become a highly respected global automotive maker."

"With the implementation of this Turnaround Plan we will ultimately achieve a 4.5% Operating Profit Margin by 2003. It will be a milestone in the history of MMC and the winners of this program will be our customers, shareholders, suppliers, dealers, other business partners and employees," said Rolf Eckrodt during the press conference in Tokyo.

The COO especially emphasized the strengths of MMC: "Since I arrived I have met many talented people and I am confident that with this dedicated workforce we can turn around the company successfully. We won the Rally Paris-Dakar that for me personally is the best proof for our world-class engineering. We will also race to bring this company back on the track to success."

The major points of the Turnaround Plan are as follows:

• Material cost savings of 15% by 2003 which will be realized through a Common Supplier and MMC Operation System (COSMOS), a program which is based on fair and result-oriented cooperation with suppliers
• Production capacity reduction by at least 20%; the closing of one out of four car assembly plants is under consideration
• Reduction of headcount by 14% (approx. 9,500) which will be the result of capacity reductions, outsourcing and optimized business and administration processes
• Focus on core business - product offensive -reducing the number of platforms (discontinuation of the Proudia/Dignity models)
• Excellent customer service through enhanced dealership relations
• Implementation of a new quality management system to achieve sustained quality procedures and products
• New organizational structure to be announced by April 1st, 2001
• The discontinuation of the advisory system

In addition to the Turnaround Plan, Takashi Sonobe said that even more savings would result from sharing components through MMC's alliance with DaimlerChrysler. One of the main joint projects is the "Z-car" 4-seater project, a model that will be launched in 2004 and produced at NedCar, a plant in the Netherlands.

The president mentioned that more details of the Turnaround Plan would be presented by the end of March.

Outline of Turnaround Plan
distributed data (8pages, slide style)	distributed data (PDF, 125KB)

If not already installed on your computer, you will need to download and install a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader (free of charge) in order to view or print PDF files.