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EuroWire – January 2012
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Transatlantic cable
“It appears lighting at the battery storage facility was the culprit,”
Kelly Fuller, the wind campaign coordinator at the American
Bird Conservancy (Plains, Virginia), told the
Herald Tribune
. “It’s
going to be very important as battery storage goes forward that
the lesson is learned and this doesn’t happen at other facilities.”
Noting that this largest bird kill at a US wind facility was the third
such incident in West Virginia, the conservancy suggested that
the solution was to turn o the lights. In fact, wrote Mr Wald:
“That is what technicians at the site did after discovering the
dead birds.”
Automotive
Constrained by a rising yen, Toyota may
shift ‘a signi cant amount’ of production
from Japan to the US
“If demand in Japan recovers, we will continue and work to
maintain production of three million units” there, said Toyota
Motor Corp president Akio Toyoda on 17
th
November. “If most of
it becomes exports, shifting a signi cant amount of production
to the US may be considered.”
As reported by By Anna Mukai and Alan Ohnsman of
Bloomberg
News
, Mr Toyoda was in Blue Springs, Mississippi, for the
o cial opening of an $800 million plant where 150,000 Corolla
compact cars will be assembled annually. Toyota o cials said
the facility will employ some 2,000 people. The Japanese auto
maker has seen its pro tability erode with the appreciation of
the yen to a post-World War II high versus the American dollar.
A stronger yen hurts the overseas competitiveness of Japanese
manufacturers and reduces the value of earnings when overseas
pro ts are translated to yen. In the six months before the Blue
Springs plant was opened the yen gained more than 9% against
the US dollar.
According to the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association,
the yen’s appreciation against the dollar and euro slashed
Japanese auto makers’ pro t by $4.3 billion in the rst half of
last year. The stronger yen, as well as the parts shortages that
followed the 11
th
March earthquake and tsunami in Japan,
contributed to Toyota’s rst-half loss of its global leadership
in auto sales to General Motors of the US. “If the yen continues
to stay strong, Toyota will collapse,” Mr Toyoda told reporters
in Mississippi. In mid-November, Toyota’s North American
plants were running overtime again after brie y slowing as the
months-long ooding in Thailand reduced supplies of parts.
“Early on, we didn’t know how bad it could be,” Jim Lentz,
president of the US unit Toyota Motor Sales, told the
Bloomberg
reporters. “[But] whatever impact it had is behind us.”
Manufacturing
New activity in the old factory towns of
Northeast Ohio is contributing importantly
to a regional recovery from recession
According to an economic analysis released on 14
th
November
by Team Northeast Ohio, a private economic development