zlacker

This debate is getting silly. Is profit margin more or less important than demand, or just as important? It's a meaningless question.

If you have a nice fat profit margin but nobody wants to buy your product, that's no good. If you're selling lots of products but making no profit on it, that's no good either.

But if you're like GM, and you're selling millions of units a year, each for tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still not making a profit, I think we can diagnose the problem as being in the margins, not in the sales.

Seriously though, if you want to go on a whine about how bad American cars are, I suggest the comments at autoblog.com which are suitable for that kind of inanity. But for this site, I have to say that the sales figures don't support the idea that demand for GM cars is small.

>>hugh+(OP)
I should clarify: actually GM's problem is not that their sales are low or that their gross profit per vehicle is particularly low either -- their problem is that they have enormous fixed costs (including, but not limited to, pensions for retired employees) which makes them particularly susceptible to small sales downturns in a way that many other car companies aren't.