Nissan Motor Co., Japan's third- largest automaker, will halt production at two U.S. plants for three days because of a delay in getting parts from Hitachi Ltd.
The plants in Smyrna, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi, will be closed today, tomorrow and July 19, Nissan spokesman Toshitake Inoshita said today by phone. Nissan has also halted production in Japan for three days from yesterday.
The carmaker, based in Yokohama, is losing 15,000 units of production from the shutdown in Japan. The disruption was caused by a supplier to Hitachi that couldn't deliver integrated circuits for engine control units on time, Tokyo-based Hitachi said earlier this week. Parts deliveries from Hitachi will resume next week, Nissan's Inoshita said, declining to specify how much production the carmaker will lose in the U.S.
Geneva-based STMicroelectronics NV, a maker of microchips, is the vendor to Hitachi, the Nikkei newspaper reported yesterday. Keiko Sako, a spokeswoman for STMicroelectronics in Tokyo, wasn't immediately available for comment.
Nissan declined 2.4 percent to 654 yen as of 9:59 a.m. in Tokyo trading. The benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average fell 1.2 percent.
The plant in Smyrna builds 550,000 Frontier, Altima, Maxima, Pathfinder and Xterra vehicles a year, and the Canton factory has capacity to produce 400,000 Altima, Quest, Armada and Titan models, Inoshita said.
