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Re: GM selling SAAB
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Posted by Otis (more from Otis) on Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:30:43 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: GM selling SAAB, pete [Profile/Gallery] , Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:18:32
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Pete,
I fully understand your passion and feelings regarding SAAB. I and many others on this board share them to one extent or another. Hate to pour cold water on the idea, but here are my two cents: it would be nearly impossible. GM has been plenty vilified for its involvement and ownership os SAAB right up to the present. The fact is, however, that SAAB has always been a niche player in the global auto scene and by the '90s needed a liason with a deep pocketed partner to meet increasingly complex emissions and safety standards that it would have had a very hard time meeting alone. This is not to speak of the marketing and legal staffs that need to be maintained in the extraordinarily challenging (from an auto maker's perspective)world we live in. I would guess SAAB was truly profitable at various times in the '70s and '80S, but something happened by the time we hit the '90s - we hit an era of world-wide overcapacity. Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura started attracting buyers of high-end cars, and the Koreans started feeding on the bottom end of the market. And none of the existing players went away (well, maybe Peugeot retreated). Everyone's profit margins came under pressure unless they were doing quite well (Toyota comes to mind), and in the U.S. the response was to build more trucks and SUVs and virtually abondon the car market from a profit perspective.

As Ford had gobbled up Jaguar and Volvo as well as others, it made sense for GM to acquire SAAB I'm sure. From the reasons given above, SAAB must have been a willing bride. If we fast forward to the present, global overcapacity is a bigger problem than ever, and the world's ecomomy (if we think of ourselves as being in one world-wide economy now) is going off a cliff. To be profitable, any manufacturer needs to produce and sell cars in high volumes if the target is the mass market. Pete, if you are something of an iconoclast who can identify with SAABs of the '70s, '80s and '90s, great - a theoretical SAAB of the future would produce such cars, BUT would also have to produce cars that are attractive to a wide audience. If you are a Porsche for example, you can sell in small numbers because you charge very high prices. SAAB will never be able to do that. There are only a couple of relatively independent car companies I can think of - Honda and BMW. Cerberus has found - to its greast dismay I imagine - that running Chrysler has been far harder than they had forseen or imagined in their wildest dreams. So that brings us to the idea of an investor buy out of SAAB. The new owners would be faced with the same needs as SAAB was in the late '80s, namely the need to partner with someone with the engineering and technical know-how to meet emissions and safety standards and produce an attractive product in an intensively competitive marketplace. And in 2009, practically no one is profitable no matter how successful they might have been in the past. Quite a fix we're in, and unfortunately, SAAB is one of the first casualties of the era.

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