General Motors : Economic And Cultural Icon Of American Business Essay

In June of 2009, General Motors Corporation filed for bankruptcy, and later rebirthed as General Motors Company in July 2009. As a smaller, leaner, and more focused company than GM Corporation, the four brands kept under the GM name are Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac. The company’s top markets by sales are China, the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Germany. General Motors Company has always been a well-known name in the automotive industry, and is still around today.

In the 1950s, General Motors (GM) was twice as large as the second biggest business in the world. GM is now solely an American car manufacturer but they used to do much more, such as making home appliances, providing insurance, and even making locomotives. But the main focus of the company was always cars. GM sold more than half of all cars sold in the United States via twelve different brands, including very popular American brands like Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Cadillac, and Pontiac (up until its discontinuation in 2010). They manufactured a variety of different models of passenger vehicles but they did not have a sports car. Their goal was to make a cheap American sports car that could compete with Jaguar or Alfa Romeo in performance and look the part. Finally, in January 1953, the Chevrolet EX-122 was born and introduced to the public as a prototype show car. GM originally didn’t even plan on mass producing it.

General Motors had to restructure the way they did business after being saved by a Government bailout (Bigman, 2013). The company understood that in order to be able to achieve success again, they would have to restructure many things; After 3 years of being bailed out, the company established a goal of $10 billion dollars a year (Kinicki & Williams, 2013), they changed their perspective into focusing on making more margins and profits, instead of focusing on incentives and units sold. In 2012 GM reported net income of $8 billion dollars, but the company plans to be more aggressive in terms of income and profit generated after paying expenses; which was one of the areas where the company had to make adjustments and restructure in order

The General Motors (GM) Foundation was fashioned in 1976 with a purpose to support and strengthen communities across the country. However in the past year GM has decided to take the foundation in a new direction renaming it GM Philanthropy and Corporate Giving but the transition will not take place until the end of calendar year 2016 (Cain, 2016). The foundation focuses on donating money to projects in the areas of sustainability, STEM education, safety, and to teamGM Cares which is comprised of employees who give time to volunteer in the communities where GM operates (General motors, 2016). “In the last decade alone, the GM Foundation has provided more than $261 million in grants to American charities, educational organizations and to disaster relief efforts worldwide,” reports the foundation’s parent company, General Motors (General motors, 2016). All funding for the GM Foundation is provided by General Motors unless in cases where the foundation matches donations given by its employees. After recently pushing the foundation to expand its philanthropic reach, General Motors names Jackie Parker as the director, global philanthropy and corporate giving who has the daily tasks of accepting grant applications, selecting which grants fall under the foundation’s purpose, and seeing through all projects that are taken on by the organization (Welch, 2015). Although the Foundation has seen many great successes in recent years this has not always been the case as

The General Motors (GM) Foundation was fashioned in 1976 by its parent company, General Motors, with a purpose to support and strengthen communities across the country. However, in the past year GM has decided to take the foundation in a new direction renaming it GM Philanthropy and Corporate Giving with the transition taking place at the end of the 2016 calendar year (Cain, 2016). The foundation focuses on donating money to projects in the areas of sustainability, STEM education, safety, and to teamGM Cares which is comprised of employees who volunteer in the communities where GM operates (General motors, 2016). “In the last decade alone, the GM Foundation has provided more than $261 million in grants to American charities, educational organizations and disaster relief efforts worldwide,” reports the foundation’s parent company, General Motors (General motors, 2016). All funding for the GM Foundation is provided by General Motors unless in cases where the foundation matches donations given by its employees.

General Motors Company was founded as a holding company to consolidate several different motor companies producing Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland and more in 1908 by William C. Durant. In 1912 they came out with an electric self-starter making the hand crank obsolete. In 1920 Durant was forced out of the company and Alfred P. Sloan Jr took over as president. Sloan reorganized the company into 5 main divisions Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet. In 1929 GM surpassed Ford to become the leading American passenger-car manufacturer and in 1941 they were the world’s largest manufacturer of motor vehicles. In 1997 GM suffered heavy losses and had to close many plants, then in 2004 they discontinued the Oldsmobile brand. In 2008 Toyota surpassed GM and was named the world’s largest automaker. At the end of 2008 the auto companies were in trouble and president Bush announced the bail-out of ‘The Big Three” automakers – Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford. GM filed bankruptcy in June of 2009, reorganized and emerged from bankruptcy a month later. They discontinued the Saturn and Pontiac brands in 2010, this left GM with only four divisions: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC. In 2010 GM rejoined the stock market and a year later were renamed the largest automaker in the world. In 2015 GM was the third in auto sales behind Toyota and Volkswagen.

General Motors is one of the most revered automobile manufacturers in the United States, if not in the world. One of its lines of vehicles, Buick, is the oldest automobile line continuing operations in the country today. General Motors has recently made a number of changes to its business practices in the recent years. However, it still has a number of difficulties to overcome. The primary problem facing this company today is the abundance of negative publicity, regulatory fines, and financial problems it has seen in the wake of a highly publicized recall of automobiles with faulty ignition switch and airbag issues. It faces the challenge of remaining a viable alternative for purchasing vehicles for a customer base that is aware of these safety issues. Additionally, the company is still trying to restore its reputation from its bankruptcy declared at the end of the last decade, and which it was able to just overcome at the end of 2014 by repaying the federal government the funds they had supplied. Addressing these issues requires the company to focus on the manufacturing and selling of vehicles at a time when its professional reputation is in considerable doubt.

After 77 years, proud and dominant General Motors was no longer known as the number one automotive manufacture worldwide. One significant contributor to GM decline was the company’s pension and postretirement benefit expenses that drove up their cost of making cars versus the cost of their foreign competitors. In 2009, right in the mist of the U.S. economic crisis GM filed bankruptcy (Welch, 2009).Prior to filing bankruptcy critics suggested that GM misrepresented their pension-related financial statements to conceal serious financial problems. In 2002, GM was facing falling stock market prices that drove down the value of their assets surrounding their pension plans and increased the company’s liabilities

General Motors Corporation, hereafter referred to as GM, has an impressive history spanning over 100 years. According to GM 's website, GM is the "global industry sales leader since 1931," and their sales are representative of such a business. GM has a responsibility to its stakeholders to remain competitive and profitable. With the decline in the economy dating back to approximately year 2000 and the impact of rising fuel prices, GM found itself in a struggle to remain profitable. Losses in profit coupled with high inventory levels, GM recognized the need for an unprecedented sales promotion to empty its dealerships of the rapidly aging current year models. In June 2005, GM announced its "Employee

In the mid to late 2000’s, the automotive manufacturing industry within the United States found itself in major trouble. This was due to a large scale decline in the US economy, as well as a loss of interest in the domestic vehicle production. This lack of interest stems from the manufacturers lack of technology, fuel efficiency, comfortability and drivability as compared to foreign automotive manufacturers. This decline in the economy along with the decline in interest from the domestic consumers led the American manufactures to the brink of bankruptcy. In fact, the largest automotive manufacturer in the United States at the time, General Motors, found itself in such extreme financial trouble, the company had to seek help from the

GM faced a financial crisis in 1990 due to overcapacities, rising oil prices and increasing

General motors, or GM as some people refer to the company as, is an automotive manufacturing company. According to the about section on the GM website there are 10 distinctive automotive brands under the General Motors corporate umbrella, they serve 6 continents, have 215,000 employees, and the global headquarters are in Detroit, Michigan. (General Motors). Until 2008, when it was overtaken by Toyota, GM was the world 's biggest carmaker, producing well over 9m cars and trucks a year in 34 different countries. (The Economist, 2009). The late 2000s were tough years on families and companies because everyone was struggling. We saw people getting pay cuts, people losing jobs, companies closing, and a skyrocket in the price of fuel. “The Great Recession—which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009—began with the bursting of an 8 trillion dollar housing bubble. The resulting loss of wealth led to sharp cutbacks in consumer spending.” (The State of Working America).

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General Motors is the crucial three is the greatest automakers within the United States and Canada and is normally distinguished by their prevailing size, geography and business model. General Motors operations are normally unionized thereby consequential to the elevated labor costs as compared to the other existing international automakers in the North America. General Motors at one period picked up the whole cost of funding health insurance premiums of its prevailing workers, their survivors and the corresponding General Motors retirees since the United States did not possess worldwide health care system (Kent & Gerald, 2011). The constant fluctuation sales and market share have made General Motors to function below its capability. In the year 2005, it functioned at eighty five percent which consequently led to the manufacture cuts, plants shutting down and layoffs. General Motors commonly depend massively on incentives and subsidies charters to dispose vehicles. This is normally significant in maintaining the operation of the plant which subsequently propelled importance section of the Michigan financial system (Leonard & Melvyn, 2006).

GM will use the trip into bankruptcy court to shed plants, dealerships, debt and other liabilities it can no longer afford. Emerging out of bankruptcy quickly will be a "new GM," made up of the four brands that GM will keep in the U.S. market -- Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick -- as well as many of its more successful overseas operations.