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
Our financial performance continues to be quite disappointing,
This is the kind of thing we need to do. I don't have a big scoreboard in my office, depicting which groups had taken cuts. I think you can say the whole family is participating in the effort to turn GM around.
GM had some notable sales successes as we continued to expand in key growth markets around the world in 2005.
This agreement is another important milestone in the turnaround of General Motors.
I was willing to go just about anywhere in the U.S. for the best job - except New York City. Of course, I received a job offer from GM - in New York City.
I own a huge number of shares of the company and have experienced the downside with our investors. I like it that way. That's the way it should be.
It's clear that the U.S. market and economic conditions have become significantly more uncertain. Overall we remain very bullish on the prospects for the auto industry in the U.S. and globally but at this point we are viewing the U.S. economy and auto market environment with considerable caution.
We believe in fair exchange rates and Japan doesn't practice that. They have massive U.S. dollar reserves, and they use them to intervene regularly.
We're not interested in a bailout, but we would like a chance to play on a level playing field.
Today we are announcing a significant update on our plan to address our health-care burden, which is the cornerstone of our efforts to reduce structural costs by a $5 billion (US) run rate by the end next year.
We're pleased to see the significant progress in our first quarter results and in the implementation of all four elements of our North American turnaround plan.
This really highlights one of the weaknesses of our business model is too much reliance on those products (large SUVs and pickups) for profit and not enough profitability from those other products,
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.
We're going to take some time here, think in terms of 30 to 60 days, to step back and decide the next step in this journey, ... There's interest among others for various forms of transactions. So we'll have options. We just haven't decided yet what makes the most sense for GM. In 30 to 60 days we'll be ready to try again with something that we expect will work this time.