Without Opel, GM might not be the world’s largest automaker.
Without Opel, GM might not be the world’s largest automaker. But it would be a highly profitable automaker. Opel will cost GM approximately € 1 billion ($1.3 billion) in the coming year and will miss its restructuring plan. Reason for the shortfall: Opel will sell only 1.4 million cars next year, 100,000 less than budgeted. How do we know this? We don’t, but it is in an internal forecast of Opel. The document somehow came into the hands of the German magazine Capital.
Capital most likely did not find the document in a Rüsselsheim dumpster. The bad news look like yet another targeted leak, aimed at scaring the unions into compliance with more job cuts.
By the end of January, GM wants to see a business plan that shows how Opel will become profitable. Capital heard that Opel CEO Karl-Friedrich Stracke is working on an austerity program. Included in the plan are cheaper materials, suppliers that make cost concessions, increased outsourcing, serious cuts in R&D expenditures.
The magazine thinks that the days of the Opel plant in Bochum and the Vauxhall site in Ellesmere port are numbered.
The unions, which have it in writing that there will be no firings or plant closures at least until 2014, will fight the plans vigorously. A strike is possible if Opel breaks the contract. That would be one way to make fewer cars.