This was posted on another forum, not sure how bad it may be for Lotus, or if they have enough to get them by until their new products roll out:
The Midweek Motorsport show on www.radiolemans.com recently received a communication from inside the factory and it makes rather grim reading for anyone with even the slightest regard for the provenance of the Lotus brand. It contained the following revelations:
- Lotus Cars have exhausted their supply of Toyota engines for their road cars so only the supercharged Elise, Exige and Evora can be manufactured.
- 100 members of staff have recently taken voluntary redundancy.
- There is every likelihood that 50-100 more staff will lose their jobs.
- The levels of unallocated (un-sold) stock is rising rapidly with approximately 200 cars now in US port stock
- Sales forecasts have been reduced to the point that about a fifth of the forecast is currently unallocated stock waiting to find buyers
- Dealerships have been served with two year notices of termination
- Lotus have borrowed over $100M to cover existing budget shortfalls with more to come early in 2011
- Lotus paid Renault F1 $14.5m in November.
- The current monthly salary commitment is $6.47M and that was before Nigel Mansell and Jean Alesi were announced as Brand Ambassadors.
It also noted that Lotus is doing a lot with such things as sponsorship of the Renault F1 team, KV Racing Indycar team, JetAlliance GT2 LM team, ART GP2 and GP3 teams as well as development of the Lotus Evora GT2. This must also be putting some stress on the financial end.
Hope they make it, it would be a shame to lose them.
