January sales: GM up, Toyota down

[PhishPhood]

Interesting figure I saw for the Super Bowl commercials.. $2.7 Million for a 30 sec spot. Add production costs and Ad agency fees I'd use $3.0 Million total budget.

Based on 300,000 units of annual sales a 30 sec spot was the equivalent of a $1000 rebate cost-wise. That's a hell of a risk for 30 secs of face time. Whew...

[Lichtronamo]

Originally Posted by lio45

Honda is also making a lot of it:



http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...F0do3ofIqh_0Yg

While it's nice to see GM up 0.01% for the month and Toyota is down 0.01% for the month, I think what matters here is that the Big Three's main rivals keep raking in billions every quarter... billions which are inevitably going to be, at least in part, re-invested in better, more competitive products and/or extra incentives to buy marketshare away from Detroit, any of which are going to hurt.

GM's sales gains in January (in contrast to everyone else being down) are likely due to several factors: 1) Moderate success of the new Malibu/outright success of the new CTS, 2) sales of the Lambdas picking up lost full size truck/SUV volume (although single models like the Edge and Highlander still almost outsell all three), 3) Jan 07 was REALLY, REALLY BAD and 4) they likely dumped sales of several specific models to fleets/increased incentives. The key as to whether the sales gain is a positive will be the quarterly financial report.

[AMERICA 123]

Originally Posted by lio45

Honda is also making a lot of it:



http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...F0do3ofIqh_0Yg

While it's nice to see GM up 2.1-2.8% for the month and Toyota is down 2.6-2.8% for the month, I think what matters here is that the Big Three's main rivals keep raking in billions every quarter... billions which are inevitably going to be, at least in part, re-invested in better, more competitive products and/or extra incentives to buy marketshare away from Detroit, any of which are going to hurt.

Sorry for not putting my head in the sand like some of the die-hard GM fans, but I can't and won't do that. True, it could be worse, but it could, too, be a lot better. Detroit needs to close the profit gap... and so far, they aren't even close to doing it.

Now go look at how how both did outside the USA - both relatively and absolutely - and against each other. When you do, GMs relative performance improvement over Toyotas performance is easily twice as good as what they did to them in the USA - which was outstanding - and which you keep trying to minimize .

Toyotas numbers were surprisingly very bad in much of Europe and in many respects the same in Japan.
Throw in the qualitative and look at the trends and GMs performance advantage looks even better.