GM is bankrupt. That’s no suprise. They’ve been bankrupt since 2006! They just avoided filing through creative financing like bonds, bailouts and banking relationships. Any other company would have long ago disappeared.
GM like many companies large or small made several massive blunders:
1. Lack of Market Touch. They lost touch with their target audience. They failed to make vehicles that appealed to their core consumers. Their leadership were Harvard Finance gurus who knew NOTHING of the automotive business.
2. Uncompetitive Product. When compared with their biggest rival, Toyota, their cars are uncompetitive, poorly designed and poorly built. In the last 50 years their market share has dropped from 60% to less than 19%. They have been on their way down for a long time.
3. Wrong Focus. GM has been pulling profits from their finance group more than their vehicle sales for many years. Rather than focusing on product innovation, creative marketing or customer satisfaction they were immersed in sustaining the economic model.
This is an example of what can happen to a business when they fail to focus on their CORE BUSINESS! Lose touch with the customer, the product and the marketplace and it is only a matter of time before economics will catch-up with you.