Rick Wagoner
Rick Wagoner
George Richard "Rick" Wagoner, Jr.is an American businessman and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors. Wagoner resigned as Chairman and CEO at General Motors on March 29, 2009, at the request of the White House. The latter part of Wagoner's tenure as CEO of General Motors found him under heavy criticism as the market valuation of GM went down by more than 90% and the company lost more than $82 billion USD. This led to his being...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth9 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Rick Wagoner quotes about
We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale.
If all you do is read the headlines, you may not have as constructive a view of the outlook as we believe you could have.
GM's top priority is to restore our North American operations to profitability and positive cash flow as quickly as possible. In 2005, we laid out a comprehensive and integrated strategy to address the structural issues that impede our competitiveness and profitability, and we are focused on rapidly executing all aspects of the turnaround plan.
GM had some notable sales successes as we continued to expand in key growth markets around the world in 2005.
History shows you don't know what the future brings.
We expect to see improved results in 2006 and further progress in 2007.
I have given no thought to anything but turning the business around, ... I wasn't brought up to run and hide when things get tough.
We've got to move more quickly in addressing these challenging, chronic structural-cost issues,
Frankly, we've done it in the fairest and most cost-effective way we could do it,
What I've seen around the world is if the regulatory desires are combined with things that affect consumer behavior - such as in Europe, they tax gasoline very heavily - you do get people to move to very fuel efficient cars; trade off bigger vs. smaller cars.
While vehicle deliveries were somewhat resilient last week, it is too soon to determine the effect on consumer confidence, ... We will closely monitor the economic outlook and will be prepared to make appropriate production adjustments.
While this sounds like a large number, we recognize that it only goes part of the way we need to go to put GM North America in the fully competitive position that is necessary to maintain and enhance our future viability and growth.
We'll have to put our helmet on and take a few months of lower overall sales.
We have decided to substantially alter the pension benefits for current U.S. salaried employees so that we can provide a competitive and fair benefit but also reduce the financial risks to GM.