Budapest  - The Japanese carmaker Suzuki is to lay off 1,200 workers, over a fifth of its workforce, at its Hungarian plant starting from December 8, the Hungarian state news agency MTI reported on Friday.

In the face of a drastic fall in orders, Suzuki has downscaled its production this year from a planned 300,000 to 282,000, while next year it plans to produce only 210,000 cars.

As a further blow to the Hungarian labour market, the Hungarian unit of Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn told MTI on the same day that it is to lay off a total of 1,500 workers.

About 1,000 jobs will be cut at its Komarom plant in northern Hungary, and the remainder from a plant in Debrecen in the east of the country, an area which already has one of the highest rates of unemployment.

Earlier this week, the US aluminium giant Alcoa announced it was making 700 workers at its Hungarian plant redundant.

The national news website Index, in a running tally of job cuts announced since the start of October, had registered a total of 10,093 planned redundancies by Friday evening.

Hungary's Economy Minister Gordon Bajnai warned at the end of last week that he foresees thousands more job cuts over the coming weeks. (dpa)