Hitachi's Chinese plant cuts production

Hitachi Construction Machinery Co, the world's third-biggest maker of building equipment, is shutting its Chinese plant for two weeks a month until October as the nation's economic slowdown triggers a sales slump.

The first weekly suspension at the Hefei plant has reduced average production rates to 25 percent, half the level of a year earlier, its President Yuichi Tsujimoto said on Aug 29 in an interview at the company's headquarters in Tokyo. The plant, set up in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui in 1995, has capacity to make 30,000 excavators a year.

"We had expected Chinese demand to pick up in the October to December quarter," Tsujimoto said. "Given accumulated inventories and machine utilization, the market is unlikely to grow as we had thought."