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
Jerry brings years of business experience and knowledge of the automotive industry to the GM board. We are pleased to welcome him to our Board.
I was incredibly impressed with his (Lutz's) continuing passion and enthusiasm for cars and trucks and the auto industry in general,
We are confronting a dramatic change in our industry and in the global competitive environment, and that requires us to look for additional ways to reduce financial risk and improve our competitiveness for the long term.
These results reinforce the need to step up our efforts to eliminate waste and lower costs, ... The industry continues to venture into new territory -- near-record demand mixed with unprecedented price pressures and intensely strong competition on all fronts.
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.
The industry sales mix is shifting away from the larger, higher-profit vehicles, even pickups, ... reflects too much reliance on those products for profitability.
I think we'll probably pass Toyota in the U.S. on the workers-per-vehicle metric.
I remember very clearly at the first budget review having a pretty direct conversation with the head of manufacturing... We began to get huge improvements in productivity and responsiveness. I got a chance to see that firsthand.
Over the last nine months we have been aggressively implementing our North American turnaround plan.
Our financial performance continues to be quite disappointing,
Our fate is going to be determined in the next three to five years on getting this business in the U.S. turned around and profitable,
Overall economic growth in Europe hasn't been robust and the car market hasn't been robust,
I think it's going to be silly not to take the competitive threat seriously. If we haven't learned any lessons from Japan and Korea, we deserve the things that befall us, ... On the flip side, the growth in China continues to be so strong that our guess is that most of the capacity in China will be used to meet Chinese needs.
Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.