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GM Fairfax assembly plant in Kansas City - Source: Reuters -
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The US car market should see a modest recovery in 2010, with unit sales possibly reaching between 11.5 million and 12 million vehicles, General Motors Co CEO Fritz Henderson says.
"2010 will be a modest improvement," Henderson told reporters at a business roundtable in Orlando, Florida.
He said the domestic market's sales could recover to between 11.5 million and 12 million vehicles next year.
Henderson said the US market this year was on track to reach 10 million to 10.5 million unit sales.
The GM executive repeated a forecast that General Motors, which is undergoing restructuring coming out of bankruptcy, expected to achieve its break-even point for the US market by next year.
"Break even ... would be a 10 million-unit market and an 18% market share. We're going to achieve that goal. We don't need the market to be 14 million or 15 million (units) to make money," Henderson said.
"We have to win in the US," he said, responding to a question about whether his own job might be on the line if GM did not show a measurable improvement in the final quarter of this year.
Henderson also said China would "very much" be a priority market for the company this year, adding, "not just for GM".
"The China market this year will be over 11 million units," he said, adding that this compared with just 2.3 million in 2001.
He recalled that back in 2002 he had predicted the Chinese car market would outstrip the US market in a decade, but said the Chinese market had grown faster than he had expected.
GM said in July that it expected more than 10% growth in its
vehicle sales this year in China, its second-biggest market after
the United States.
Henderson said he was thankful that the company had moved to
increase capacity in China in the early 2000s, despite criticism at
the time that this was overly aggressive.
Referring to GM's plans to sell a majority stake in Opel to a Russian-backed consortium around Magna, Henderson said he was negotiating to have the necessary agreements in place by early October and was confident this could be done.
