General Motors on Thursday (27 October) said that its sales in the first three quarters of 2005 rose 27.8% from a year earlier, helped by a rebound in sales following a slow start.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Analysts told The Associated Press (AP) that a large share of the growth in GM’s sales in China, which totaled 472,468 vehicles between January and September, was from a mini-vehicle joint venture with partners Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp. (SAIC) and Wuling Automotive.
SAIC-GM-Wuling, China’s biggest maker of mini-vehicles, makes Wuling brand mini-trucks and minivans and the Chevrolet Spark mini-car. GM owns a 34% stake in the joint venture, which has the capacity to turn out 300,000 vehicles a year and is struggling to keep up with demand, AP noted.
Higher sales by the Wuling joint venture might not mean strong earnings growth since the low-cost mini-vehicles have low profit margins, the report said.
China’s passenger-car makers reported a 52.9% year-on-year drop in profits in the first three quarters of this year, according to a report earlier this week by the National Bureau of Statistics, The Associated Press noted.
