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
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.
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.
We would welcome a more proactive role from elected officials at the national and state levels in broad-based strategies to address the U.S. health care crisis.
With the ongoing globalization of GM's product development organization, and the implementation of our global architecture strategy, Bob felt he needed to devote his efforts to product development full time, and I agreed, ... Bob's legacy at GM will be in our future cars and trucks. It makes sense for him to devote his full energies to that critical task.
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,
There are some things that I like, like education, wine, and I'd like to be a good cook, although I'm a pretty good eater now.
The fact is that errors were made, and we can't change that. What we have done is disclose our mistakes and work as diligently as we can to fix them.
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,
Our relationship is strong, and we look forward to our continued partnership. This transaction will allow us to preserve our business relationship, while further building up GM's already significant liquidity position during this critical phase of our turnaround.
I was incredibly impressed with his (Lutz's) continuing passion and enthusiasm for cars and trucks and the auto industry in general,
I think everybody's reeling a little bit about how fast things have moved south,