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EuroWire – September 2009
Automotive
With its sale of Saab to a Swedish
car maker, General Motors
all but exits the European market
General Motors Corp on 16
th
June announced that it had found
a buyer for Saab. The sale, to the Swedish car maker Koenigsegg
Group, relieves GM of the fourth and last
of the units that retarded the struggl-
ing Detroit giant’s downsizing effort,
mandated by the White House.
If all four transactions proceed as planned,
GM could emerge from Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection by the end of the
third quarter.
The largest piece of the GM European
operations, Adam Opel, is going to a
consortium of buyers led by the Canadian
auto parts maker Magna International
and including Sberbank, a Russian lender.
Hummer is being acquired by a Chinese
machinery manufacturer. Only Saturn
will remain in Michigan, having been
sold to the Penske Automotive Group
whose chairman is one of the biggest
automobile dealers in the US.
Why Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial
Machinery Co Ltd wants the notorious
gas-guzzler Hummer is something of
a mystery. A similar curiosity might
attend the sale of Saab, except that this
prestigious but underperforming brand
has always tended to defy analysis.
Saab sold just under 94,000 cars world-
wide last year, principally in Sweden,
Britain, and the American Northeast.
According to Autodata Corp, through
the first five months of this year only
4,607 Saabs were sold in the US, a 55%
decline from sales during the same period
of 2008. The company’s Swedish buyer,
Koenigsegg, an unlisted company of just
45 employees based in Angelholm, turns
out only a few high-performance cars per
year, at a price of $1 million-plus apiece.
General Motors will provide Saab with
some parts and technology, and GM and
Koenigsegg will jointly fund the rollout of
some products in the pipeline.
Saab will move production of its 9-5
models to a facility in Trollhattan, Sweden,
from the plant in Rüsselsheim, Germany,
where it now makes the car.
As noted by Ken Bensinger in the
Chicago Tribune
(17
th
June),
the sale of Saab to Koenigsegg will cause GM’s prominent role in
Europe, the world’s largest car marketplace, to virtually disappear.
The sale reduces GM’s presence in Europe to the Chevrolet
brand, which represents less than 5% of all sales in the
region. The Chevrolet unit is run by GM’s Korean subsidiary,
Daewoo Auto & Technology.
Dorothy Fabian –
USA Editor
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