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 With product chief Mary Barra set to take over as CEO next month
after Dan Akerson's retirement, the No. 1 U.S. automaker has been
tending to financial matters that will allow her to focus on
operational issues and on shoring up the money-losing European
operations.
GM on Tuesday named 51-year-old Barra as its next CEO, making her
the first woman to lead a global automaker.
GM's shares were 7 cents lower at $40.09 in late afternoon trading
on the New York Stock Exchange.
The automaker has made a slew of announcements in the past week,
including that it will drop its Chevrolet brand in Europe and end
manufacturing of vehicles in Australia to help end losses in those
regions. On Monday, the U.S. Treasury sold the last of the stake it
inherited after providing GM a $49.5 billion bailout in 2009.
"A lot of this has to do with year-end cleanup and the transition to
new management," Guggenheim Securities analyst Matthew Stover said.
On Thursday, GM said it sold its remaining 8.5 percent stake in Ally
Financial Inc for $900 million. It declined to say who had bought
the shares.
GM has been rebuilding its finance operations, announcing in
November 2012 that it would acquire Ally's European and Latin
American auto lending operations to expand its in-house financing at
GM Financial as a way to boost sales. GM closed those deals in April
and October this year.
Ally, formerly known as GMAC, was a unit of GM until private equity
firm Cerberus Capital Management bought a majority stake in the
lender in 2006. Burned by bad mortgages that its subsidiary
Residential Capital made during the housing bubble, Ally later
received a $17.2 billion federal bailout.
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GM also said it will sell its entire 7 percent stake in French
alliance partner PSA Peugeot Citroen <PEUP.PA> because the
investment is no longer needed, but said the industrial cooperation
between the companies remains strong. GM and Peugeot on Thursday
lowered savings goals for their scaled-down alliance.
GM late last year wrote down $220 million, or nearly half, of its
original $423 million investment in Peugeot.
Analyst Stover said GM's sales of the Peugeot shares likely cleared
the way for the French automaker to close a deal for a closer tie-up
with China's Dongfeng Motor Group <0489.HK>.
GM also said on Thursday in a U.S. regulatory filing that Barra's
compensation has not yet been determined. Analysts expect the
compensation packages of GM's top executives to rise now that pay
caps put in place during the era of U.S. Treasury's ownership have
been removed.
Last year, she had total compensation of about $4.9 million in her
job as global product development chief. Akerson said after Barra
was named his successor that compensation at the company will become
more performance-oriented with as much as a quarter tied to quality.
(Reporting by Ben Klayman; additional
reporting by Laurence Frost in Paris, Sophie Sassard in London,
Edward Taylor in Frankfurt; editing by Matthew Lewis)
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