Now that GM is government owned and operated, we can see that their sales numbers have become as reliable as BLS statistics. The article below explains GM's recent but odd activity of stuffing their dealerships with new cars. It appears their sales numbers are now only dependent on how many adjacent parking lots their dealerships can lease. This highly manipulative tactic is not much different than what the Commissars did during the Stalin years to hide inefficiency and certain gulag punishment for the family.
Regards - VHF
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What Do China’s Economy and GM’s Sales Have in Common?
Graham Summers
March 4, 2011
...What’s this got to do with GM’s auto sales?
GM engages in similarly deceiving fuzzy numbers.
As the mainstream financial media trumpeted the other day, GM announced incredible sales growth of 49% for February. Of course, they didn’t bother reporting on the second half of the GM’s sales announcement. As Bill King noted in a recent King Report the full sentence from GM’s press release was:
General Motors total sales in the United States rose 49 percent in February, as dealers reported 207,028 deliveries for the company’s four brands… Month-end dealer inventory in the United States stood at about 517,000 units, which is … about 101,000 higher than February 2010.
If you dig deeper into GM’s recent releases, you’ll find that GM’s YoY deliveries rose 45% in February.
So total sales rose 49% and deliveries rose 45%? Which one of these truly represents ACTUAL money GM made? Either of them?
It’s hard to tell, check out this little snippet from GM’s 10-K:
…we generally recognize revenue upon the release of the vehicle to the carrier responsible for transporting it to a dealer, which is shortly after the completion of production. Vehicle sales data, which includes retail and fleet sales, does not correlate directly to the revenue we recognize during the period.
So GM counts a car as sold the moment it leaves a production facility on a shipping truck, NOT when it’s actually sold to a consumer. So the more cars and trucks GM makes… the greater its sales numbers.
