General Motors Corp. on Wednesday posted a 13.3 percent June sales decline to 383,156 units, its biggest monthly sales slump since the beginning of the year.
The worlds largest automaker said its U.S. passenger car sales tumbled 16.7 per cent to 225,087. Total truck sales were 158,069, a drop of 7.8 per cent that exceeded industry analysts expectations.
GM blamed the drops on an overall soft market, two costly work stoppages and slow sales of older models. For the first half of 1997, GMs sales were at 2,375,081, 5.3 percent behind the 1996 level.
Industry sales for June, with most major automakers reporting, are down about 6 percent from a year ago, confirming analyst expecations of a continued soft vehicle market. For the first half of this year, sales are off 1.6 per cent.
GM disclosed earlier this week that a continuing strike at its Pontiac, Mich., full-size pickup truck plant and an earlier strike at its Malibu and Cutlass car plant in Oklahoma City resulted in the loss of 96,000 units in the second quarter. GM spokesman Dean Rotondo said the lost units translate into three quarters of a point of U.S. market share and will prohibit the automaker from reaching its 33 per cent market share goal for 1997.
He said GM expects to hang on to the approximately 32 per cent it now has. In the auto market, GM said all of its divisions except Cadillac reported lower sales in June. Rotondo said newer car models, such as the Pontiac Grand Prix, which rose 140 per cent to 11,492, continue to catch on with consumers.
However, those gains were offset by sluggish sales of older models. Sales of GMs popular Chevrolet C/K full-size pickup truck were down 15 percent to 37,104 units, a victim of the strike.
But GM also saw drops among its profitable full-size sport utility vehicles. The Chevrolet Tahoe fell 8.3 per cent. Chevrolet uburban
sales dipped 6.5 percent and the GMC version of the big sport utility dropped 14 percent. Also down was the Chevrolet Blazer compact sport utility, which is competing against aggressive incentives from both Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp.Christopher Cedergren, managing director of Nextrend, a
Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based consulting firm, said the lower truck numbers were surprising, especially because GM was not up against a difficult comparison from a year ago. The Ford Expedition is putting a hell of a lot of pressure on GM, he said. Its chipping away at the Suburban and Tahoe.
Cedergren predicted that Ford will report Expedition sales around 22,000 units when it releases sales numbers on Thursday. That would beat the previous monthly record of 20,701 in May.
He said GMs car sales will likely be down again in July. After that, they should begin to show year-over-year increases as production of new models increases. Among other automakers reporting June U.S. sales Wednesday, Mazda Motor Corp. posted sales of 27,062, a rise of 28 per cent.
Among European automakers, Mercedes-Benz of North America Inc., a unit of Daimler-Benz AG said its sales were 8,326, up 14.4 per cent. BMW of North America Inc., a unit of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG said its sales were 11,035, up half a per cent. On Tuesday, Chrysler said its sales fell 4 per cent.
