Ford Set To Pass GM in North American Production
By Michelle Krebs May 27, 2009Ford is on pace to overtake General Motors this year as the top North American producer of
vehicles, according to a forecast by IHS Global Insight.
Ford, which has been No. 2 for decades, gets a boost from GM idling its plants in the next couple of months to produce an estimated 1.7 million vehicles in North America this year.
"With Chrysler in bankruptcy and GM likely on the verge of it while accelerating the already-announced termination of three brands [Hummer, Saab, Saturn] and adding a fourth brand [Pontiac] to its list, we think the stigma surrounding these occurrences will have a negative impact on sales at both companies in 2009," the forecasting firm reported.
Chrysler, which has curtailed production during its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and is not known when it will re-start output, will have its North American production fall to No. 5 behind Honda and Toyota, according to IHS Global Insight.
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This may be a short term anomaly, and confined to North America. While GM is "ausgeben" Opel & Vauxhall in Europe, they still are alive in at least 33 other countries, including China. It seems that they are putting the "mature" markets; North America, Western Europe and Japan, on the back burner and pursuing the emerging markets: China, Russia, Eastern Europe more aggressively than Ford is currently.
Yes, GM is pursuing emerging markets aggressively, but despite the spectacular sounding % increases, actual sales in most of those areas are in the mere thousands, versus hundreds-of-thousands in each of the mature markets.
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