Report Purpose
Transportation options are an important part of people’s everyday lives. Though often taken for granted, the specified industry and the companies operating in it contribute extensively to the improvement of the quality of life. Therefore, a scrutiny of the current challenges and opportunities that can be pursued in the target industry by the firms that work in it is required.
The goal of the report is to provide a review of the automotive industry and shed light on the changes that have occurred it over the past few years. The threats that organizations producing vehicles face nowadays, as well as the chances that they have to improve the quality of the products and enhance the safety of their customers, will be analyzed. Thus, a better understanding of the further course of the industry’s development will become a possibility.
Particularly, the General Motors Company will be considered in the report. Its recent successes and the issues that it has been facing will be explored. By outlining the future pathways for GM’s development, one will be able to forecast the overall evolution of the automotive industry.
Industry Overview
The automotive industry includes the organizations that produce, develop, or sell vehicles (“Global Automotive Executive Survey”). Because of the importance of transportation, especially as a part of the supply chain management process, the industry has been gaining increasingly high significance over the past few decades (Parkin et al.). Since the 1990s, the number of cars sold annually has risen from 39.2 to 78.59 million units (“Number of Cars”).
The automotive industry has undergone significant changes with the recent introduction of innovative information technologies. The IT advances allowed souring the development of the automotive industry to a considerable extent (Parkin et al.). The emergence of hybrid cars as the means of addressing environmental concerns should be viewed as one of the dramatic changes in the automotive industry development that have taken place so far (Eady).
However, despite positive sales and comparatively good performance, the recent S&P 500 (14.8) and the Dow Jones Index (10.1) point to the fact that the automotive industry has been experiencing certain difficulties in advancing in the global market (Parkin et al.). The specified problem can be attributed to the fact that the recent innovations in the automotive manufacturing industry are focused primarily on altering the traditional contours and features of vehicles as opposed to introducing cost-efficient solutions to the product (Parkin et al.).
Company Overview
General Motors (GM) has been known for manufacturing and selling cars for quite a while. The organization was founded in 1908 by William C. Durant (Colby 708). Its current headquarters are in Detroit, MI (Colby 708). Initially, GM was built as a holding company; however, with the increasingly large significance of cars in transportation, GM was redesigned to produce and sell vehicles (Parkin et al.).
With the rise in the popularity and influence of the environmental movement, GM started producing green cars along with diesel ones. Particularly, the firm currently offers hybrid and all-electric cars as a part of its production (“Automotive Industry ETFs in Focus”). Its sales have grown by 9.20 in 2017, and the organization is expecting further progress (“General Motors Co (GM.N)”).
The increasingly high competition levels in the global market can be deemed as the key challenge for GM at present. Tesla as the leading company in manufacturing and selling electric vehicles is a serious rival for GM (Eady). Therefore, a comprehensive marketing framework must be designed for GM to maintain its presence in the global market.
Works Cited
“Automotive Industry ETFs in Focus.”Yahoo! Finance, 2017. Web.
Colby, Laura. Road to Power: How GM’s Mary Barra Shattered the Glass Ceiling. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
Eady, Trent. “GM’s Chevy Bolt Is Not Serious Competition For Tesla’s Model 3.”Seeking Alpha, 2017. Web.
”General Motors Co (GM.N).”Reuters.com, 2017. Web.
“Global Automotive Executive Survey.”KMPG.com, 2017. Web.
“Number of Cars Sold Worldwide from 1990 to 2017 (in Million Units).”Statista.com, 2017. Web.
Parkin, Rich, et al. “2017 Automotive Trends.” Strategy and PWC, 2017. Web.