OREANDA-NEWS. Ford Sollers plant in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad region will keep four-day week until 2015. It was announced by spokesman of JV Ford Sollers for “RBK”, by adding that the decision to maintain this schedule is connected with the situation with the sales at the Russian automotive market.

Union of company clarified for "Interfax" agency that the downtime will be announced in the next two Fridays, on September 12 and 19, 2014. In this case, from September 22nd to December 31st, 2014 at the plant it will be introduced a four-day work week, workers will have three days off. Ford Sollers Plant switched to four-day week immediately after the summer holidays, from August 11th.

According to estimates of Ford Sollers, a collapse in sales of Ford vehicles in Russia in I half of 2014 brought a loss for a joint ventures in amount of 3.43 billion Rubles. During the same period of 2013, the production has brought a profit of 33 million Rubles. Losses were caused by devaluation, reduction of the market and large-scale investments in the program of launch of new products, said the First Deputy General Director of Sollers, Nikolay Sobolev. According to him, this year the plant will start the production of mini-crossover EcoSport, next year - Fiesta and the new generations of Focus and Mondeo. At the end of July, the parent automaker Ford wrote off the investment in the joint venture Ford Sollers by 329 million Dollars after the collapse of sales by 39%. The company hoped that the launch of new models will help it.

According to the Association of European Businesses (AEB), sales of the Ford brand in Russia for the first eight months of 2014 topped the list of leaders in the fall, by reaching 43% with a reduction to 39,670 cars. Therewith, the model Ford Focus the most suffered, which is produced at the plant in Vsevolozhsk. Sales of this model fell by 59.2% to 18,661 units.