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April 23, 2009
One of America's biggest auto makers is cutting back production and cutting down on jobs -- again.
Troy Clark, North America President of General Motors (GM), held a press conference today to discuss the company’s production and inventory moving forward in 2009.
Clark said that the company will be reducing production schedules in order to more closely align inventories with market demand. During the reduction, 13 assembly plants will be shut down for several weeks at a time, thus removing 190,000 vehicles from GM’s production schedule in the second and third quarters of 2009.
At the end of March, over 760,000 GM vehicles remained in dealer stock. The plant shut-downs are designed to reduce inventories to under 530,000 by the end of July.
Of course with this news comes layoffs, though Clark declined to say how many employees will be affected.
“If I gave you any number, you couldn’t correlate it to anything that’s going on,” said Clark. He said that the layoffs would take place on a rolling basis and that any one of GM’s manufacturing line employees could be affected from one to eight weeks in duration.
Clark said that employees would receive unemployment benefits for some period of time as the plants are down.
On a positive note, Clark said that GM’s Malibu brand was still generating “ample demand” in the marketplace.
“The Malibu is in short supply and we will continue to run that plant and make that product and get it out to customers,” Clark said.
Clark said that the production cuts did not mean that the company was reducing its sales forecast, and did not mean that the company was more eager to file for bankruptcy.
“We don’t see things getting worse,” said Clark. “There are few advantages to having a high inventory. It’s less expensive for our dealers to be carrying less inventory.”
They will receive unemployment benefits for some period of time as the plants are down.
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