GM Cuts Hundreds of Workers as Ford Climbs Most in Three Years

Watch GM Cuts Hundreds of Workers as Ford Climbs Most in Three Years - Bloomberg on Dailymotion

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00:00It's hard to parse because you're seeing GM and Ford have these strong earnings reports,

00:06huge moves in the stock. President Trump is taking victory laps over this on True Social.

00:12And yet this morning our colleague David Welch in Detroit had the scoop that GM is laying off

00:19hundreds of workers. So you have this situation where, as you say, the amount of sales these

00:26companies are pulling off with full-size SUVs. You know, the Ford Expeditions, the Chevy Tahos,

00:34those sorts of vehicles are really hot. And in some cases, you know, as good as these companies

00:41have seen in something on the order of two decades. And yet also with that, you know, real cost issues

00:49in terms of tariffs, I think maybe not the worst case scenario that they were concerned about

00:53months ago. But absolutely, those were still still headwinds. I think there is a concerted effort on

01:00the part of these two companies, however, to sort of, you know, really thank Trump for the these sort

01:07of incremental bits of relief that he's taken off from of the measures that were put in place earlier

01:12this year. Is that part of it done? Is that part of the story over? Are they still working to kind

01:17of continue to whittle away at some of the costs imposed by the president's policies?

01:21I think it's still very much a live issue. And interestingly, you know, some of the the

01:28attempts to sort of curry favor with the White House seems to be around actually sort of applauding

01:34his move to put new tariffs in place on medium and heavy trucks. And the reason that they are

01:42appreciating that is because their rival, Stellantis, makes big Ram pickups down in Mexico. So

01:49it's a case of actually two players in Detroit kind of ganging up on the third and sort of,

01:56you know, praising Trump. And I think that was one of the interesting storylines out of last night's

02:00earnings that Ford sees, you know, sort of some incremental opportunity to take advantage of the

02:05fact that one of their big competitors now faces much more of a tariff bill on those larger pickups

02:11that are made down in Mexico. Craig, reading between the lines from the GM release and then the Ford

02:17results, it feels like these companies are stepping back on the margin from EVs and EV investments. And

02:25that seems to be one of the things that the street is applauding here. How do you read it?

02:30Yeah, I think it's a little different across these, these two companies where you have GM has is much

02:38further along, I would say in standing up battery capacity, standing up EV capacity as well. So they,

02:45I would say, on the other hand, have, you know, kind of on one hand have more, more EV potential and more

02:54battery potential to work with and haven't quite sort of cut to the bone in terms of, you know, what

03:00they have to offer. And yet I would say, you know, it's also been the case that, you know, it's fair

03:06to look at sort of what they've managed in terms of how many EVs they're selling. And, and fair to say

03:12that it's been a real disappointment. It has, we've not seen the ramp up in demand that that was hoped for,

03:19you know, even in the times when we were able to take advantage of $7,500 federal tax credits,

03:25as we know that those days are now gone. And so you're seeing, you know, GM cut back, I think

03:30Ford's cutting back sort of predated some of these policy changes. And it's more to do with the fact

03:37that they've, they've just been losing so much money on that side of the business and have a little bit

03:43less to work with in terms of progress in scaling up the business and, and bringing down costs.

03:48Thanks to that scale.