General Motors Overview

General Motors

Introduction

General Motors also known as GM is a company that established its first company in the United States. GM company manufactures, designs, and sells cars, trucks, and SUVS for their clients in different parts of the world. The company has its head office in Detroit, and for 77 years, General Motors had the number one spot for the car company with the highest amount of car production until when Toyota took over from them. Today, General Motors is still very popular.

What GM does is it lets its cars out for leasing deals, sell directly to customers, and sells its cars to the government. This helps the company to make enough revenue it needs for itself to grow. The company has a few car brands under its name. These car brands are Cadillac, Chevrolet, On, Wuling, etc. These car brands are just a few to mention. General Motors is a big company on its own and it has over a hundred employees from all its different branches around the world.

History of General Motors

In the early 1900s, 1908 to be precise, General Motors Company was established by a lover of auto mechanics, William C. Durant. During this time, the company already has some car brands to its name. These car brands include Marquette, Oakland (later known as Pontiac), and Buick to mention just a few of them. The company did not only produce cars at that time, but they also had a strong truck and their trucks were also known to be fast.

General Motors Corporation 1912 produced its first electronic car brand, Cadillac and it became really popular that it even put Manuel out of business. GMC re-established itself in 1916, making some improvements to its business, but then the company’s head office remained in Detroit. In 1918, two car brands were added to General Motors, these are Delco Products and Chevrolet car company. A year later, two other brands joined GM – Fisher Body and Frigidaire (the two companies were later bought outrightly by General Motors). The founder of GM that is William Durant also tried to purchase Ford Automobile Company, and add them to the GMC brand collection but was unfortunately unable to do so because the company lacked complete funds to purchase the company. After some time, the company sort that Durant was perhaps overpowered and voted him out of office.

After Durant’s leave from office, the company was headed by Alfred Sloan Jr in 1920. Alfred headed the company as president from 1920 to 1937, and later from being the president, he became the chairman of the board from his year of leaving the president position in 1956. One significant thing that Sloan did while he was still in office was that he unified the different brands of GM to be under one company. These different brands are Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Chevy.

During the time of the unification, GM and the brands under it went through a series of changes. These changes included better finance management, a decentralized mode of management to ensure good maintenance, redesigning and re-structuring the car models, and lastly, there was the expansion of GM’s sales team.

By 1929, General Motors even surpassed Ford, becoming one of the most popular car makers in the US. The company opened other offices in some parts of the world by 1925, these countries include Germany, Australia, and even England. By 1931, the company became one of the biggest car makers in the whole world.  The company had produced 44% of the car makers in the United States around 1941, making the company one of the biggest conglomerates in the world. GMC trucks became part of General Motors’ products by the year 1925.

Around the 50s and 60s, General Motors and the United States had the same growth in their economy allowing General Motors to maintain 40 to 45 per cent of the automobile sale in the US. In 1984 General Motors ventured into something else, expanding its business scale; the company purchased a big data processing company called the Electronic Data Systems Corporation. Besides the data processing corporation, GM ventured into aircraft, buying Hughes Aircraft Company. The HAC makes weapon series and satellites for communication.

Bankruptcy and Recovery of General Motors

Every company must have gone through one crisis or order. GM faced its financial crises during the time of President Bush. During that time, to save America’s automaker industries, that is Chrysler, Ford and GM, the President created a Financial plan to maintain and keep these companies running. This plan made the Troubled Asset Relief Program. This plan was funded with a total of $700 billion which was approved by congress to support these automakers with a total of $13.4 billion which will be given to them as government loans.

By March 2009, the companies which received this government loan must prove that they are financially balanced, after which within 30 days the company will need to repay their loan. This change was also made for the growth of businesses. Chrysler and General Motors were the first companies to receive funds. Ford didn’t seek funds because the company claimed that it was good enough to continue doing business.

Things went pretty rough for General Motors in 2009, and the company filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (having a debt of more than $173 billion). In 2010, the company had no option but to let off some of the companies that it had acquired. After the whole downsizing, GM was only left with Chevy, GMC trucks, Cadillac, and Buick. By November of the same year, General Motors became the largest IPO in the United States of America and by 2011, GM became one of the biggest car makers again.

General Motors made an impressive recovery by the year 2014 when they emerged from a controversy that had to deal with problematic ignition switches in their car models for up to 10 years. It was said that this problem led to 120 fatalities. The company responded to this controversy in one of the best ways, thanks to the first female CEO, Mary Barra. However, the company’s branch in Europe continued to struggle which made the company sell some of its car brands to PSA Group. The PSA group is a company that makes cars for Peugeot and Citroen. The money paid by the company was a good deal to help GM bounce back to business in Europe.

Controversies

From 1938 to 50, General Motors deliberately monopolized sales of buses and accessories to NCL and its subsidiaries. These subsidiaries operated in different cities around the United States which violated the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. General later sold the buses off.

Ralph Nader published an article called “Unsafe at any Speed” which made a big blow to the business of General Motors. There was a serious problem with the company which made it shake. The problem was said that there was a serious problem with the suspension, this problem was common with the Chevy Corvair models which were sold between 1960 and 64. The company was able to overcome the problem thanks to journalist David Davis. He published an article which said that it was the same suspension that Porsche, Benz and Volkswagen are using for too same kind of swing axle.

Conclusion

General Motors like any company has been through the storm and yet has come out of it as any other company has. It’s part of the reason why they are still standing tall today. Amongst all the competitors, GM has proved that they are a reliable and good company that produces great quality automobiles for the public and government.