World's Largest Automaker: TTAC Up-Revises GM's Year-End Estimate By 300,000 Units

Yesterday, we did one of our regular checks on the World’s Largest Automakers. Today, finally some good news for the GM camp: TTAC is up-revising its year-end projection for GM by some 300,000 units. Here is why:

Yesterday, we used 4.67 million for the half year as a base, to arrive at 9.34 million by the end of the year. Today, we use 4.81 million , to arrive at 9.63 million when the ball drops. Usually we use official data for these projections. We used the 4.67 millionafter they were communicated by GM ahead of its quarterly report, which we have now. Lets use what we should have used.

The world’s largest automakers are (like it or not, we don’t make the rules) decided by production, not by sales. The 4.67 million communicated by GM spokesman Jim Cain is a sales number. According to the Q2 report, GM and its joint ventures produced 4.816 million units worldwide in the first six months of 2012. So far the good news.

The bad news is that bottom line worldwide production grew only 1.9 percent. Some may make snarky comments that between production and sales some 146,000 cars are sitting around unsold, but let’s not get hung up on details.

It should be noted that Toyota also differentiates between production and sales, whereas Volkswagen only reports what they call “deliveries.” We use VW’s deliveries as production, because that’s what they usually report to OICA.

Also, there are “sales” and “sales” at GM. As the Q2 report says:

“GMNA vehicle sales primarily represent sales to the ultimate customer. GME, GMIO and GMSA vehicle sales primarily represent estimated sales to the ultimate customer. In countries where end customer data is not readily available other data sources, such as wholesale volumes, are used to estimate vehicle sales.”

Understood?