Last week, while I was reading the 7th straight month of growth for Ford Motors, it appeared that we are finally well past recession. How else can we explain the consistent growth achieved in the last 6 months by Ford Motors and General Motors.
It is very true that the year did not start on a very promising note with Toyota finding itself in the middle of the massive recall muddle that affected more than 8 million vehicles. Inspite of the extent of negative publicity, Toyota was able to bounce back in April. During the initial few months, Ford and General Motors made merry at the expense of Toyota’s failures. This has resulted in Ford and GM making considerable progress and revenue gains.
The situation in the US has been encouraging and some cheer has been reported from European countries as well. However, there is still a large piece of doubt that remains as far as Europe automotive market and European automotive manufacturing companies are concerned. The recent credit crisis is a case in point and many analysts believe that a recovery in the automotive market will take a severe beating if the scope of crisis expands to other European countries as well.
With the Greek crisis still not over, there seems to be some sort of turbulence as far as European recovery in the automotive sector is concerned; most analysts will be happy to give a judgment after seeing the trends in this quarter of the year. For sure, everyone, including the financial and automotive markets is hoping that the recovery strengthens over the next 3 months and the sales volumes sustain the initial periods of growth reported in the first 6 months.
And hence, a period of caution seems to entail for the automotive industry and especially the European manufacturers that include Volkswagen. Up until now, Volkswagen and other European manufacturers have had a good period of growth in the last 6 months and if the Greece crisis was a one-off exception, then we can surely hope for a continued recovery on path of automotive growth across the Globe. For now, almost all automotive manufacturers including Toyota have a reason to cheer. All of them are out of the woods of so-called slowdown.
Rob May is a seasoned automotive analyst and he advocates using fuel cards for business fleet operations. A fuelcard can help in effective fuel management and fleet operations.