Ammann: As it was in the US, the turnaround of any business in this industry needs to be driven by product first. So we have continued to invest very heavily in product. For Opel, there are a couple of very important launches coming later this year, the Opel Adam, the city car, and the Mokka, the small SUV. Those are critical for us. But at the same time that we’re pushing on the product side, we are continually benchmarking, not just at Opel but around the company, to make sure that every aspect of our operations is benchmarked to the best within GM, but also to the best benchmarks that we can find externally. And so we will continue to right size and find efficiencies in all of our operations around the world until we get to really world-class levels of efficiency. Sometimes that involves reducing the number of employees we have, taking work out of the system to get more efficient. But where we need to take those actions, we will.
MacDuffie: Let me ask you about another part of the world, China. China’s been a very big success story for GM and continues to be, both your own brands, Buick first and now Chevrolet and some of the brands of your partner companies like Wuling. Again, some of this happened well before you arrived, but what’s your sense of what has helped GM to be so successful in China? What are the capabilities of GM managers that have helped them do so well in that market? And how do you then think about what looks like a coming slowdown in auto sales and maybe in China’s economy more generally? Have you got the team and the capabilities to manage through, not a situation of high growth, but of perhaps slightly stalled growth?
Ammann: Sure. The history of GM in China has been a success from the outset. Some of that was attributable to what I would call a first mover advantage, being one of the first foreign manufacturers to really take a serious position and develop a serious partnership in China. We have a very strong partner through SAIC, our main partner in China, and a really mutually beneficial relationship that’s developed between GM and SAIC through the joint ventures that we have. It’s really been a story of mutual success as we’ve gone there.
In terms of the Chinese economy and the current outlook, people talk about China slowing down, but it’s slowing down from double digit growth to single digit growth. We need to keep that in perspective.
MacDuffie: That’s pretty good compared to a lot of other places.
Ammann: Compared to a number of other places in the world. But we need to keep an eye on what the competitive landscape is, how much capacity is coming into the market, so on and so forth. Clearly a slow down at the same time that capacity is coming in is something that we keep an eye on. But we remain very bullish on the fundamental long term macro economic story in China. And we will, of course, carefully calibrate our business quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year as we move along that path to ultimately a very long-term growth.
MacDuffie: Great. Let me wrap up with a question that’s more future-oriented. Like any company, arguably General Motors’ future rests on the quality of the talent that you bring in, now and in the future, and how well you’re able to build an effective team. So I’m wondering how make the pitch to young people, [not only] in the US, but worldwide. I think going to big corporations and certainly big automakers has not exactly been the first choice of [those] Wharton students [who find] finance and consulting jobs more appealing. To bring in some of that top talent, what’s your pitch?
Ammann: I think the pitch is the same whether we’re recruiting a very senior executive or someone out of business school. And that is that we are in the middle of the transformation of one of the world’s largest and most important corporations. This is an incredibly fascinating, complicated and demanding business. We’ve taken a business that was in serious trouble, and we have successfully restructured. We’re at the point today where we’re very stable and strong financially. We’re making money, and we’re back in growth mode. That’s a really big and important change for this industry, which has been in a cost cutting phase for so long.
We’re back in a growth mode. We’re back in a reinvestment mode. We’re fundamentally transforming the way that things happen inside of General Motors. That involves a lot of the very deep talent we have in the company, but absolutely supplementing that with people whom we recruit from other companies externally, as well as new people coming in out of business school and so on. I’d say we’ve been very successful in attracting some very senior executives and very well placed people from other companies into our organisation. We’ve been similarly successful and rapidly improving our ability to bring in talent out of the best schools into the organisation, as people realise that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get involved in one of the great corporate transformations of all time.
MacDuffie: Great. My bet would be that your appearance before our students today helped that process. So thanks very much for coming to Wharton and speaking to Knowledge@Wharton.
Ammann: Thanks for having me here.
