The jury on the likely US sales tally for 2012 is still out after a January that (pleasantly) surprised our resident Stateside statistician Bill Cawthon and sparked off a bit of discussion at just-auto Towers this week – will the light vehicle market for the year break through 14m, as an increasing number of pundits now suggest, or will the remaining 11 months see it pegged back to the 13.5m-ish consensus of late last year?
I liked the to-the-point response of two analysts with which I lunched in Detroit earlier this month: “13.6m with optimism”. That’s much in line with what LMC’s Dave Schuster told editor Dave Leggett this week and in the same ballpark as JD Power’s call last month. And with what GM sales chief Don Johnson told Dow Jones earlier this week.
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I think we’ll all be eyeing the monthly numbers from the US with greater interest than usual as 2012 rolls along but I doubt we’ll see the heady days of 17m for a long, long time and wonder if, given the amount of capacity the Detroit Three have taken out of North America in the last few years, if they’d have enough left for that size of market anyhoo…
On the other hand, one of the Three, Chrysler, on a roll since emerging from Chapter 11, is adding capacity, at least for now at its Dodge Dart plant at Belvidere. This just in…
Speaking of Chrysler, a healthy set of 2011 books was revealed this week, despite the little matter of a US$551m charge for post-Chapter 11 debt repayment costs. Sure, Uncle Sam wiped the slate clean back in ’09 but a return to net profit just two years later and a doubling of operating profit is not to be sneezed at. And it wasn’t just Chrysler (we also had the full Fiat-Chrysler results here and have grouped all the quarterly financials covered to date here for your convenience).
After listening in to the results conference call, our own Rob Golding chimed in with his view on Fiat-Chrysler-Sergio and even relative minnow Mitsubishi piped up that it was back in the black so far in fiscal ’11/’12.
You can’t rule out another Eurozone melt-down or natural disaster, but I am cautiously optimistic the tough measures put in place after the global financial crisis are, finally, starting to be reflected in increasingly better quarterly reports, especially at those automakers most active outside Europe. While those heretofore perhaps a little too Europe-dependent are fast looking beyond the continent and already seeing results.
Finally, as you may have heard, just-auto is, this coming week, kicking off the first of a regular series of webinars and we hope you’ll join us. Our first, hosted by editor Dave Leggett and joined by Jonathon Poskitt, analyst from LMC Automotive, will present the results of our annual survey on what the industry expects from the year ahead, as well as the latest market forecasts. It starts at 16:00GMT; 17:00CET and 11:00EST on Thursday 9 February and will last for 60 minutes. It’s free to attend and you can register for the event here.
See you then. In the meantime, have a great weekend.
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
