General Motors reportedly has dismissed as “preposterous” a newspaper report on Thursday that it was trying to sell its loss-making Swedish brand Saab.
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According to Reuters, Swedish paper Dagens Industri said that GM had contacted several Chinese firms, but also mentioned Renault and Nissan as potential purchasers for Saab.
“The rumor is totally preposterous. We have stated any number of times over the past several weeks and months how committed we are to the Saab brand and to the people in Sweden,” General Motors Europe spokesman Tony Cervone told the news agency.
Separately, Saab’s chief executive, Peter Augustsson, and a board member of GM Europe, also denied the report.
“These are unreliable speculations. GM stands behind Saab all the way,” he told Swedish public radio, according to the Associated Press. “Saab is here today and manufactures good products. We will be here in the future and make even better products.”
Saab spokesman Christer Nilsson told AP the report was “one of the coarsest speculations we’ve heard and it goes in a completely wrong direction.”
“The fact is that GM’s management has expressed strong support for Saab as a brand and also attaches great importance to having Saab as part of its production portfolio,” he told the Associated Press. “Saab is an important player in the premium segment and Saab is one of the few brands that GM is selling globally.”
“In the past month the position on Saab’s future has changed,” Dagens Industri quoted what it called a source with good links to GM as saying, according to Reuters.
The news agency noted that was at odds with GM officials who have gone out of their way of late to say they wanted to keep Saab as one of its few global brands, and an entry point for buyers of premium cars, while also making clear Saab needs to improve its performance by boosting sales and broadening its product range.
Reuters said GM is cutting its European workforce by a fifth to stem losses in the region where it last made money in 1999 and is due to announce by the end of March whether it will build its next-generation mid-size car at the Saab plant in Trollhattan, Sweden, or at the Opel Plant in Ruesselsheim, Germany.
Models built on the so-called Epsilon architecture include the Opel Vectra, the Saab 9-3 and the planned Cadillac BLS, which will be built specifically for the European market, the report added.
Reuters noted that GM has said that the plant that does not get the work will take a serious blow but not necessarily be shut down.
Dagens Industri reportedly said Saab has lost about 20 billion Swedish crowns ($US2.9 billion) during its 16 year marriage to GM and sizeable staff cuts in recent years had made it impossible for it to develop and sell the volumes needed to be profitable on its own.
Production of the new Cadillac BLS would initially be placed in Trollhattan from 2006, the paper said according to Reuters, but assembly would be moved to Ruesselsheim later on.
It would not save Trollhattan in the long run, with GM placing production of the successor to Saab’s 9-5 model in the United States, Dagens Industri added, Reuters said.
