General Motors Co. will end a 25-year-long practice of disclosing monthly vehicle-sales results and shift to quarterly reporting, complicating investors’ efforts to gauge the health of the U.S. auto market.
“Thirty days is not enough time to separate real sales trends from short-term fluctuations in a very dynamic, highly competitive market,” Kurt McNeil, U.S. vice president of sales operations, said in a statement Tuesday. GM stopped holding a monthly conference call with analysts and media in January 2014 and discontinued releases of monthly production figures months earlier.
GM’s break from tradition will impede investors’ ability to gauge the annualized sales pace of the world’s second-largest auto market on a monthly basis, as data from the top-selling car company in the country will go missing. The switch comes as analysts widely expect industrywide deliveries to slump for the second year in a row after an unprecedented seven-year growth spurt.
On Tuesday, analysts had been expecting GM to post a 5.1 percent sales increase for March, the average of seven estimates. The automaker plans to release second-quarter sales on July 3, third-quarter sales on Oct. 2 and fourth-quarter sales on Jan. 3.
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why GM is halting monthly reports is to buy more time to make their reporting look better.
Submitted April 03, 2018 at 09:20AM by COMPUTER1313 https://ift.tt/2uIiNsj
