General Motors (GM) recently announced plans to realign its manufacturing capacity, reduce its salaried workforce by 15 percent and close five plants in North America.
The assembly plants marked for closure in 2019 are Oshawa Assembly in Oshawa, Ontario, Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Detroit, and Lordstown Assembly in Warren, Ohio. The propulsion plants scheduled to close are Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland, and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.
In addition to the previously announced closure of the assembly plant in Gunsan, Korea, GM will cease operations of two additional plants outside North America by the end of 2019.
These actions, which are in response to market-related volume declines in cars and changing customer preferences, are expected to increase cash flow by $6 billion by the end of 2020.
"These actions will increase the long-term profit and cash generation potential of the company and improve resilience through the cycle," said Mary Barra, GM chairman and CEO. "We recognize the need to stay in front of changing market conditions and customer preferences to position our company for long-term success."
To further enhance business performance, GM will continue to evolve its global product development workforce and processes to drive world-class levels of engineering in advanced technologies and to improve quality and speed to market. Resources allocated to electric and autonomous vehicle programs will double in the next two years.
Additional plans include increasing high-quality component sharing across the portfolio, expanding the use of virtual tools to lower development time and costs, integrating vehicle and propulsion engineering teams, and compressing global product development campuses.
GM also recently invested in newer, highly efficient vehicle architectures, especially in trucks, crossovers and SUVs. The company intends to prioritize future vehicle investments in its next-generation battery-electric architectures. As the current vehicle portfolio is optimized, it is expected that more than 75 percent of GM's global sales volume will come from five vehicle architectures by early next decade.
For more information, visit www.gm.com.