If ever I was to leave my profession of an automobile industry analyst with SupplierBusiness, I would surely love to work with some of the multinantional auto manufacturers in India. Not for the work but surely for the money and the perks. Look at it, Ford India and GM India are perhaps the highest paying automotive companies in India when it comes to middle management. And both of them are also the most loss making of all Indian manufacturers. Is there a correlation here or just plain coincidence?
Well look at this, a CEO of GM was commended for the successful lauch of 'Brand Chevrolet' in India. What did they expect? That someone can actually screw up on that? And what does one mean by successful when your monthly sales is in the mid four digits. The last head of Ford India also received plaudits for a job well done!
And Ford and GM retain their middle level and senior level managers better than superglue. Most of them are there for years and years, a commendable quotient of loyality. In an already exciting job market churned recently by Reliance Retail's unquenchable thirst of performing talent, that is quite commendable indeed.
So how many does Ford and GM each sell? Their annual sales are still below the 100,000 mark in a market that crossed a million one year back. And they have been in the market for more than a decade now, most of which was spent in smelling the exhausts of Honda and Toyota, not to mention being trampled all over by Hyundai and Maruti-Suzuki. And there doesn't seem to be any light yet at the end of the tunnel or to put it in a better way and borrowing an old adage, the light at the end of the tunnel for Ford and GM is a tractor-trailer loaded with Toyotas, Hyundais and Hondas. Coming back to GM India and Ford India, the two entities seem to have made a habit of making losses. Ford India has seen nearly its cmplete equity being wiped out by losses. GM India doesn't seem to be doing anything great in a hurry either. Both their parents should be worried but then the Indian operations' losses are probably just a trickle from a nick, nothing major when you have an entire leg and an arm chopped off.
