GM sees slower global growth as buyers resist price rises

General Motors Co., the largest U.S. automaker, sees slowing global auto sales growth and said it will invest more in new cars as consumers pay less for the company’s older models. The automaker’s shares fell.

Global auto sales may increase about 3 percent to 98 million vehicles, said Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens. President Dan Ammann said China, GM’s biggest market, is “maturing rapidly” amid a global slowdown of industry growth. The Detroit-based automaker is boosting capital expenditures by about 20 percent to $9 billion.

At the same time, the automaker may have a harder time getting customers in the lucrative North American market to keep paying top dollar for cars and trucks. While the freshest designs are winning high transaction prices, shoppers aren’t willing to pay as much for older models, Stevens said. And GM’s pace of new-model introductions is slowing this year. 

“We see a deceleration in growth” of global auto sales, Ammann said at the investor presentation. “We will have an increasing investment-spending requirement. There will be a heavy investment cycle for the entire industry over the next couple of years.”

About 27 percent of the company’s sales this year will be of models that were new or refreshed in the previous 18 months, and that percentage will rise to 38 percent in 2016, according to slides presented by the company. Last year, the rate was 30 percent of deliveries.

The automaker’s worldwide sales rose 2.1 percent to 9.92 million vehicles last year, according to a statement Wednesday. That’s fewer than the 10.14 million that Volkswagen AG reported on Jan. 11. Toyota Motor Corp. hasn’t yet reported global sales.

GM fell 2.7 percent to $34.30 at the close in New York. The shares had gained almost 1 percent this year through Tuesday after declining 15 percent in 2014.

GM entered last year predicting modest improvement in its earnings before interest and taxes and its adjusted EBIT margin, and by both of those measures, 2014 will end up better than managers had forecast, Stevens said. Profitability should improve further in 2015 with even better sales of pickups and sport-utility vehicles.

“We will post very strong operating performance, much better than we expected at the beginning of 2014,” Stevens said. “We expect 2015 profit to be up.”

With gasoline prices in the U.S. at the lowest in more than half a decade, sales of profitable light trucks are projected to remain strong.

Excluding the costs of GM’s record recalls, with fixes announced for almost 27 million autos in the U.S. alone, adjusted EBIT is projected to rise this year. The automaker reaffirmed 2016 forecasts for North American adjusted EBIT margins of 10 percent and a return to profitability in Europe. Global adjusted EBIT margins will probably be 9 percent to 10 percent after 2020, GM said in a statement. (Bloomberg)