What Is General Motors Unethical

General Motors Analysis General Motors (GM) is a United States car manufacturer that was founded by William C. Durant in Flint, Michigan dating back to 1908. GM headquarters is located in Detroit, Michigan and is among one of the world’s largest automakers, conducting business in over one hundred and twenty countries with production facilities in thirty-seven of those. GM dominated the automaker industry for over seventy-seven years (1913-2007) through ownership of over twenty-five different companies, such as Chrysler, Buick, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Cadillac. During these seventy-seven years the company faced many challenges with their competitors but maintained their power over them. However in 2007, General Motors began to lose significant
GM also failed to meet the lean technique of cost efficient supply chains. GM owned most of the companies that provided them with their supplies, locking them into high cost of internal suppliers with poor quality products. In an effort to lower improve on these supplies, GM became too aggressive with their suppliers. GM frequently shared supplier information with other suppliers to put pressure on them to reduce costs to GM. The unethical behaviors lead to the loss of suppliers. In an effort to be released from U.S. tariffs for importing their vehicles, the competition also began the realization of building their own manufacturing plants inside the borders of the United States. Quickly realizing they could maintain the same standards for low costs, quality and supply relations, foreign competitors began to expand their facilities offering more vehicles at reduced costs to
Focusing on their marketing strategies GM needs to change the many divisions and its offerings through each division to be successful in the future. The many divisions within General Motors have brands and within those brands reside a variety of models (Moore). Each one of these requires a different set of manufacturing facilities, marketing systems, supply chains and dealers. Currently General Motors has a variety of 57 different types of vehicles on the market, each resulting in a focus on a small portion of a market segment and in some instances direct competition with one another for the same customers. To turn around the company to once again net positive results, GM needs to restructure their divisions. GM can restructure their market focus to create and grow long term positive net cash flows by reducing the divisions, brands, and model varieties they offer to consumers. Developing market shares within a large market segment with competitive prices, high unit margins with low fixed costs and low investments will result in positive cash flows for GM. Reducing the variety of models within each brand and cutting out brands that are fixated on only small market segments would increase the company’s competitive ability. Decreasing the amount of vehicles would increase GM’s ability to combine resources to