Bankruptcy

Opal Sale at Gm Clouds Saturn?s Future

By mcbride

As previously noted, when GM closed Oldsmobile, it lost a division replete with good cars running great engines.  Olds had bad marketing.  Saturn was the polar opposite, great marketing even with far inferior cars.  Rather than taking the Olds products and rebranding them as Saturns, GM kept selling the inferior Saturn products until it was obvious that something had to change and then eventually it added new solid products built by its German company, Opal.  These Opal products are good cars which now populate the Saturn showrooms, with the noted exceptions of the SUV and the Sky which are GM built products.  Opal is now for sale and one primary potential buyer is Fiat, the Italian company which is ?buying? Chrysler.  That would be especially troubling for GM as it could not assure that the Opal products were still available for Saturn since Chrysler and GM still are competitors, although both continue to run on the same tax dollars.  However, there is now another bidder for Opal, which is getting a better reception at GM HQ. ?General Motors Corp. has received at least three bids for its ailing German carmaker Adam Opel GmbH and would prefer, at this stage, to pursue a deal with Canadian supplier Magna International Inc. than with Fiat SpA of Italy, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.  The sources said top GM officials are skeptical of Fiat Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne’s bid to form a huge automaker by combining Fiat’s auto business, its prospective stake in Chrysler LLC and GM’s European and Latin American operations.  Marchionne views the crisis sweeping the global auto industry as an opportunity to reshape the sector, but some top GM officials harbor resentment because of the collapse of a previous alliance between the two companies.?

 Here is a link: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090521/AUTO01/905210364

 Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on May 21, 2009 (boomark / email).