Britain’s government is considering providing financial support for carmaker Jaguar Land Rover’s suppliers after a shutdown caused by a cyberattack was extended until October, a government source said on Thursday.
The luxury carmaker owned by India’s Tata Motors has three factories in Britain that together produce about 1,000 cars per day.
The company is losing at least 50 million pounds ($68 million) a week, according to the BBC, with many of its 33,000 staff told to stay at home.
A parliamentary committee said some small suppliers had told them they had, at most, one week left before they ran out of cash.
Read more: Jaguar Land Rover Cyberattack Fallout Spreads to Suppliers
JLR said in a statement that as part of a “controlled, phased restart of our operations” some of its systems were back online and it was working to clear a backlog of payments to suppliers as quickly as possible. It did not comment on the BBC figures.
Government Says it Has Two Priorities
Secretary of State for Business and Trade Peter Kyle and Minister for Industry Chris McDonald visited JLR on Tuesday and talked to the CEO about how the company can work towards restarting production.
“We have two priorities – helping Jaguar Land Rover get back up and running as soon as possible, and the long-term health of the supply chain,” said McDonald.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government was looking at several ways to provide support to JLR suppliers without going into detail.
Schemes under consideration included the government buying component parts from the suppliers to enable them to survive until JLR resumes production, according to a BBC report.
Another option was providing government-backed loans, the BBC said, although it added that the idea was not popular with suppliers.
Some Systems Back Up and Running
JLR said it had told suppliers some systems were online, including the ones that control the supply of parts worldwide and the financial system that controlled the wholesale of vehicles. It also said capacity for processing invoices had increased.
“We are now working to clear the backlog of payments to our suppliers as quickly as we can,” a JLR spokesperson said.
The British Parliament’s Business and Trade Select Committee wrote to finance minister Rachel Reeves after meeting companies in JLR’s supply chain on Thursday, asking how any support schemes would work.
“Smaller firms, we were told may have at best a week of cashflow left to support themselves. Larger firms, we heard, may begin to seriously struggle within a fortnight – and many are simply unclear how they will pay payroll costs at the end of October,” the committee’s letter said.
Tata Motors finance chief P B Balaji told the committee’s chair Liam Byrne in a letter dated Tuesday that JLR was working with its supply partners to prioritize payments to “those with the greatest need,” adding that JLR intended to settle any outstanding payments “in the coming weeks.”
“We are engaged across multiple stakeholders to find solutions to support JLR’s commercial partners and hope to find a practical workable solution at the earliest,” he said.
Mike Hawes, the head of Britain’s automotive trade body SMMT, said the cyberattack’s impact on the supply chain and wider industry on which it depends was “severe and of indeterminate duration.”
(Reporting by Paul Sandle, Muvija M, Elizabeth Piper and William James; editing by Mark Potter, Hugh Lawson, Barbara Lewis and Diane Craft)
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Topics Cyber