Back to the Beginnings

Well, today came the first steps towards the de facto reorganization of GM without going through the de jure process of bankruptcy court. The game has switched from softball to hardball ... squash. No more finesse, whoever has the most power wins. It's not GM's bondholders and it's not the UAW. But it may be the collapsing economy that proves the most powerful, not the Obama administration.

Arguing that issue will take time -- my outline is 5 single-spaced pages, not the sort of thing for which a blog is suited. Instead let's do a little applied IO (industrial organization), beginning about a century back. The auto industry evolved in a manner familiar from that perspective, at least in its stages if not the overall process.

After the formative years of playing with multiple technical standards and marketing strategies, as well as corporate structures, Henry Ford latched onto a combination that worked. He assembled parts and sold his Model T to dealers, collecting money up front, and paid suppliers in arrears. Vanadium steel alloys and ultimately the moving assembly line enabled him to push down the weight of his car, and up the speed of assembly. Inventory turns, all that -- though since the old man hated accountants, there are no books to trace the financial evolution of the firm. In any case, he soon dominated the market, in the US, in Europe, in Asia.

Now Henry owned the firm, or at least he did after forcing out the other shareholders, something he'd done twice before in the forerunners to the Ford Motor Company. (He was not a nice man.) No one could dissuade him from his policy of ever-lower prices as he improved the basic model and (for many years running) lowered his costs. But there was a bottom to how low he could push costs, and others began attacking his position from upmarket. GM succeeded, and the Model T began a gradual decline, until in 1926 Ford was forced to pull it from the market while he rushed the development of the Model A. By the time he launched it in 1927, Chrysler had also emerged as a player. Monopoly power made Henry insensitive to the shifting market, and the lack of outside shareholders meant there was no restraint on his whims. Ford was free to give away market share; if he wanted to bankrupt his firm, that was his business.

Fast forward 50 years for a variation on that story, to which I will provide another spin. From the early 1950s into the early 1970s GM was the dominant firm in the US auto industry (and with the exception of Japan, number one or two in the markets that mattered outside the US). For twenty years running it was the most profitable manufacturer (and often the most profitable firm) in the world, earning a 20% return on assets. But with just over 50% of the US market, antitrust considerations constrained additional expansion; it had to allow Ford and Chrysler a share of the market. Through price leadership it could nevertheless coordinate pricing policy with them; its economies of scale were considerable, and it was the low cost producer. The other two firms thus wanted to avoid a price war; though they could set prices below GM's umbrella, they could not be unduly aggressive.

Eventually such high profits did encourage new entry. Via imports the Scandinavians had a modest presence, as for a while did British, Italian and French firms. Of course there was also American Motors, an amalgam of US firms that emerged -- or rather merged -- after WWII. More successful was the German firm VW, particularly when a fad for small cars swept the US in the late 1960s, making the Beetle a hit. But as had happened in the late 1950s, the small car fad passed and the market for that low-profit segment shrank. Detroit was relieved, because if they all entered, it would have been a bloodbath: flooding the market with low-margin products was not an attractive business proposition. When there was another swing towards small cars in the late 1970s, following the first and especially the second oil crisis, VW stumbled and it was Japanese firms that captured the small car market. Again, the Detroit Three wisely sat on the sidelines. But US government policy worked against GM and the others. Ronald Reagan's VER ["voluntary" export restraint] policy effectively asked the Japanese government to organize a cartel to raise prices in the US. Carter's CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standard and the earlier Clean Air Act bolstered the position of these new entrants, because they favored small cars and imports. The profits of the VER and the breathing space of other policies gave the Japanese time to build a distribution network and to move upmarket. We know the rest of the story.

Back to substance: over the next quarter century GM steadily ceded market share to these and other entrants. (At present 14 firms assemble vehicles inside NAFTA -- ignoring equity ties, two are Korean, three German, three are Detroit-based, and six are Japanese.) Doing so was rational. GM could have lowered profits to preserve share. But why should it do so when it was so dominant? The modest increment garnered by the new entrants was no more than a burr on its side, and shareholders would rightly have screamed if it gave up its bounteous profits that it earned on its 50% share of the market in an effort to scare off these entrants. Henry Ford was irrational in his strategy. But GM was rational in its refusal to fight. Making way for fringe firms to enter the market is the only sensible strategy for a dominant firm.

Eventually a dominant firm thus will cease to be dominant. So it was with GM, though it hung onto the most profitable segment, light trucks, and did well thereby. That would be the end of the story if downsizing was easy in the auto industry. Even then it might not have mattered had GM not had to shoulder pensions and especially healthcare obligations for its increasing numbers of retirees. Such aspects must await another post.

Let me reiterate the central point. GM's management certainly made many mistakes. This included such bone-headed investments as Saturn, billions spent on automation and other hoped-for "magic bullets" that ignored basic operational competence, and an overarching role for people with a background in finance rather than manufacturing, engineering or marketing. Nevertheless its core strategy was consistent with earning high levels of profits for its shareholders. Indeed, it was sufficiently successful in this that going into the current recession it was Toyota that was mimicking GM in its strategy in North America, rather than the other way around. Another year or two of breathing room would have made all the difference.