One of the bigger stories of 2013 has so far managed to escape the news cycle. I’m not exactly sure why Nissan’s announcement of significant reductions on the MSRP of new cars hasn’t gotten more coverage, but I’m also not 100 percent sure of Nissan’s motives either.

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GM’s pickup truck changeover has received all the attention of TTAC’s commentariat, but GM knows it needs more than new trucks to make up for decades of deteriorating market share. All hopes are on a wave of new showroom offerings. “Seventy percent of the automaker’s U.S. portfolio will be refreshed between the start of 2012 and the end of 2013, and 89 percent will be refreshed by 2016,” writes the Detroit News. (Read More…)

Once upon a time, GM’s North American operations spewed red ink across the firm’s balance sheet, with the whole mess kept afloat by relatively strong overseas operations. Now GM makes most of its money at home while its international divisions limp along. No, really: in its just-released Q1 financial report, GM reveals that some $1.7b of its $2.2b global EBIT came from its once-troubled home markets. What a difference a bailout makes!

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Automotive News reports, with their usual straight face, that “GM sees new models spurring rebound from lower U.S. market share.” The question isn’t whether GM has made this claim before, but how many times it has made it.

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GM’s turn-around hinges on a market share above 19 percent, board member Stephen Girsky said at an industry meeting in October 2009. “The public plan is 19 percent and change. That is what everything is being based on,” Girsky said during a panel discussion at a conference at Columbia Business School. Reuters was taking notes.

In the 3^rd quarter of 2009, GM had a market share of 19.5 percent. The share climbed to 21.8 percent in January 2011, and eroded ever since. (Read More…)

Gains in market share, that is. It’s market share that counts. That perplexing axiom had been drummed into me in the many decades I spent on the other side. You need to be faster than the overall market, or you fall behind. Of course, you can gain share by giving away cars, but you won’t do that for long.

Detroit had a big comeback last year. Let’s look how big. And let’s discuss whether Bloomberg is right when it predicts that “U.S. automakers led by General Motors Co. may lose share in their home market this year.” (Read More…)

At the times of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Toyota proudly stood on the podium of the Chinese sales winners, along with Volkswagen and GM. Ever since, Toyota received the wrong fortune cookies in China: Its market share deteriorated steadily, down to half of its 2008 high. Toyota now is on an all-out offensive to re-gain lost ground, with promising success. (Read More…)

Nissan’s “we have cars” ad may not meet with the approval of TTAC’s commenters, but it appears to be having some kind of effect. According to mid-month analysis by the A+ rated experts at Edmunds Autoobserver, Nissan’s looking at the strongest retail sales growth in the industry this month, building on last month’s already-strong performance.
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“If you have no cars, you will lose market share,” said double-CEO Carlos Ghosn at last week’s annual results conference of Nissan. He said openly what other carmakers on the other side of the Pacific only dare to whisper into the ears of sympathetic reporters, or via analysts at banks and brokerages: The March 11 tsunami will cost Japanese makers big chunks of market share. The questions is: For how long? (Read More…)

The combined market share of GM and Ford will reach 40% of the US market by the end of 2015. Yes, you just read that correctly. That’s a full five percent more share than what they have today, or a gain of just one percent a year. Call me crazy… but recall that Farago and I called the GM bankruptcy way before most industry observers (and certainly before the BoD of Old GM) could see it coming. Long time TTAC readers will also remember my call to buy Ford’s stock in April 2009 when it was trading in the three buck range. So calm those gut-reactions for a few minutes and let’s walk through this.

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Ask an industry-watcher to name an automaker that seems to be doing things right, and chances are one of the top choices would be Ford Motor Company. And though Ford is enjoying favorable perceptions in the media, according to the company’s own internal goals, it’s actually underperforming. And in a key metric, no less: retail market share. Bloomerg reports: (Read More…)

Retail market share is one of those metrics that tends to cut through the vagueness of pure sales-volume numbers, reflecting an automaker’s performance compared to the competition, without the distraction of fleet sales. It’s not a perfect measure of a business’s overall strength, as fleet sales can help with economies of scale and capacity utilization, but it’s one of the most accurate ways to measure the appeal of a firm’s products with real consumers. And, based on this chart of GM’s monthly retail market share (as calculated by TrueCar VP for Industry Analysis and all-round data ninja Jesse Toprak), GM’s much-vaunted Lutz-era products aren’t moving the needle with those real consumers. Emerging from bankruptcy didn’t seem to provide much of boost either. And unless drastic happens soon, GM’s battle for consumer acceptance will continue its slow but steady decline. Not good!

Hit the jump for raw data and a historical chart of GM’s non-retail market share.

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Call me a cro-magnon cave dweller, but whenever I read these “car of the future” stories, I am reminded of a discussion I had with a Volkswagen engineer, some time in the late 70s. I was a wide-eyed copywriter and believed anything.

“I am working on the car for the year 2000,” the engineer announced.

“Wow! What will it be?” the wide-eyed copywriter asked in awe. (Read More…)

Collectively, the the Detroit Three have enjoyed precisely one market share turnaround in the last several years: Ford in 2009. This year, Detroit’s market share looks downright stagnant. Chrysler’s got a tiny bump going on, but Ford’s lost its fizz and GM is skidding bottom… at best. On the other hand, if this graph is just too gloomy for you, hit the jump for one of the first glimmers of (market share) hope for Detroit in years.

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Whereas Chrysler’s surprise operating profit in the first quarter of this year was achieved mainly through cost-cutting, GM’s just-announced Q1 profit comes on the strength of sales increases in most of its global markets. Though The General’s sales numbers are still lower than they need to be, momentum is headed in the right direction… albeit somewhat more slowly than had been hoped.

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