Stocks: (GM)(F)(TM)(HMC)What is it about China? European and American car executives think that if they say the name of the country in the same sentence with the names of their companies, their stocks will immediately go up 5%.GM’s CEO says that his company is getting bigger in China. GM is going to build more cars and components there. It would make sense given how much less expensive the labor is that the UAW-brand workers.Now, of course, Ford, Toyota, Honda, VW, and several other large car companies have the same aspirations for China, so it is starting to look like North America in terms of competition. This does not even factor in the local car companies who may have an edge because of the tendency of the Chinese government to favor the home team.Leaving aside all of the excitement about China, GM is still in deep trouble in it home market. Its share in the US seems to be stable now at about 25%. But, with it program to cut annual costs by $9 billion still not complete and concerns that the UAW may not sacrifice warm bodies forever, GM still has a long way to go.In addition to GM’s own problems in the US, Toyota continues to accelerate its effort to take market share from the Big Three. The big Japanes car-maker said it will open its seventh plant in North America within the next two years. The last anyone looked, GM was not opening any plants in Japan.GM can’t win in China if it stands on feet of clay in the US.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
GM In China Town
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.
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