Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley will temporarily suspend production at their UK manufacturing facilities to curb the coronavirus' spread.
Jaguar Land Rover said it will halt output next week and it intends to resume production at the facilities in the week of April 20. The company has thee car plants and an engine plant in England.
The automaker's manufacturing plants in Brazil and India are continuing their operations, the company said in an emailed statement.
The Tata Motors-owned automaker said on Wednesday it would suspend production at its plant in Nitra, Slovakia, from Friday due to the pandemic.
Bentley said it will stop production at its factory in Crewe, England, from the end of Friday for four weeks.
The Volkswagen Group ultraluxury brand builds about 11,000 vehicles a year. It said the move was to protect the health of its workforce and due to accelerating constraints on activity and declining demand in some markets.
The Crewe factory should reopen on April 20, CEO Adrian Hallmark told Reuters, just as the automaker had returned to profitability last year after a difficult 2018.
"We were all set up for a gangbusters 2020, the first two months of the year have been very strong ... and then the coronavirus hits us," he said.
"Any ideas of glory and big profits that we had have been tempered significantly but having said that, we really don't know how it's going to play out."
Bentley swung to a 65 million euros operating profit last year from a 288 million loss the year before, VW Group said in a statement on March 17. Its sales revenue was 2.1 billion euros and the brand achieved a 3.1 percent operating return on sales.
Automotive News Europe contributed to this report
