Detroit On The Amazon

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 22, 6:17AM EDT

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China used to be the next big thing for the Big Three. Now it is South America. GM (GM) is saying that it can grow it Latin America and African revenue by several billion a year over the next few years. According to Reuters, the company’s sales in those regions has gone from $5.4 billion in 2003 to $15 billion last year. GM actually plans to increase manufacturing, especially in Latin America.

Over at Ford (F), demand in South America is so strong that the company is thinking about exporting cars from its North American plants into the region. That is the first good news Ford plant managers and workers in the US have heard for some time. The company told Reuters that "South America’s auto market was growing fast, especially in Brazil and Argentina, but the automaker’s future market share growth there may be constrained by lack of capacity."

Ford’s South American market share has grown to 12 percent this year from 8.4 percent in 2000.

All of this is unexpected. At least among most investor. India and China were to be the next markets that would drive growth for the US car companies. But competition in China is so fierce that GM has just announced that it will offer zero percent financing on models that it makes with its JV venture in Shanghai. According to The Wall Street Journal "In the first six months of the year, sales growth of GM brands in China lagged far behind the overall sales increase for passenger vehicles. Sales of Buicks, Chevrolets, Cadillacs and other GM cars made by Shanghai GM were up 12%, while car sales overall grew 26%."

GM cannot afford that kind of fall-off in China. Unless it sells the cars in South America.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.