DETROIT — General Motors Corp., struggling to survive, will slash jobs, cut production, sell assets and suspend its dividend for the first time in 86 years as it tries to ride out an unprecedented collapse of its core U.S. market.
Tuesday’s actions, which the company said will save $15 billion through 2009, carry a more urgent tone than past roadmaps to recovery. This time, GM is facing one of the most serious threats in its nearly 100-year history, with one analyst speculating that the world’s largest automaker by sales could wind up seeking bankruptcy protection.
GM said if its latest, unoptimistic predictions hold true, it will have enough cash to sustain itself to 2010. But with no guarantee that the economic slump and U.S. sales downturn have hit bottom, the latest addition to a long string of restructuring efforts may not be enough to keep GM from going the way of Studebaker.
“We are in an unprecedented challenging environment here in the U.S.,” President and Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson conceded in an interview. But words like “crisis” and “panic,” Henderson said, aren’t useful.
“What’s useful is decisive action,” he said.
While the emphasis is on cuts, GM is preserving funding to develop new small cars and car-based crossover vehicles that people are craving as they abandon pickups and sport utility vehicles. There’s also money for vehicles of the future such as the Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car.
“In short, our plan is not a plan to survive. It is a plan to win,” GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said in a broadcast to employees.
The company said it would cut white-collar costs in the U.S. and Canada by more than 20 percent, shed thousands more factory jobs by cutting truck production, borrow $2 billion to $3 billion and take other measures such as selling assets to generate cash.
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