General Motors is making steady progress in cutting costs and developing new products -- and it isn't ready to cede its position as the world's top automaker, GM's top executive said Thursday.
Richard Wagoner, GM's chairman and chief executive officer, said he knew Toyota's plans to build 9.4 million vehicles in 2008 could threaten GM's long reign as the world's top carmaker.
"I like being number one and I think our people take pride in it. So it's not something we're going to sit back and let somebody else pass us," Wagoner said during a meeting with reporters on the eve of the North American International Auto Show.
"We're going to have to fight for every sale and do it in a way that is consistent with building the enterprise," Wagoner said. "If as a result of that we get passed, it won't be a happy day for me. But I've lost basketball games before and as a result of that you get ready, you learn, and go back and play the next day," said Wagoner, who played college basketball as an undergraduate at Duke University in the early 1970s.
"We're going to fight to keep the position and if we lose we're going to fight to get it back," Wagoner added.
The GM chairman noted that GM has plenty of opportunities to grow its sales in places such asChina, Latin America, South Africa, and Russia.
"Globally we had a good year," said Wagoner, who noted the company's worldwide sales totaled 9.1 million units, down slightly from 2005. In 2006, Wagoner noted, "about 55 percent of our sales were outside the U.S. and that's going to continue to grow not because we don't want to do sales here, but that's where the growth is. If you look back over the span of about five years, we've grown sales outside the U.S. by 1.3 million units, which is certainly the encouraging part of the story," Wagoner told a small group of reporters.
"We're looking forward to another good year in 2007 for the global industry," added Wagoner, who said he expected sales of new cars around the world to grow to 69 million units this year from 67 million units in '06. "It could even get up to 70 million. We see pretty solid economic backdrops around the world," Wagoner said.
GM's sales in the U.S. in 2006 dropped to their lowest level since 1970, when the company's production was crippled by a bitter strike by the United Auto Workers.
Wagoner said GM has had a lot of success in cutting the structural costs inside its North American unit, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy only a year ago. Costs are coming down in North America but Wagoner declined to offer any kind of projection about when the critical unit would return to profitability. GM lost $10.5 billion in 2005, almost all of it in North America.
"I'd love to have stronger sales in the U.S. but on balance I thought the guys did a pretty good job in sticking to the plan and moving in the direction we wanted," Wagoner said. In addition, new vehicles like the company's pickup trucks also are getting high marks from independent reviewers.
"The new crossover vehicles have been almost uniformly been well received," he added.
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