The global pioneer in automotive production, General Motors is exploring to venture into new partnerships for its Opel brand in a bid to enhance the brand popularity and the quantum of revenue and profit generated from the brand.
With a view to achieve optimum plant capacity utilisation at Opel’s production facility, General Motors may embark upon new projects to be undertaken at the manufacturing plant dedicated for the brand Opel and will be shifting the manufacturing operations of French car maker, PSA Peugeot Citroen to the Ruesselsheim Development Centre.
Mr. Karl Stracke, Vice-President of GM and President of GM, Europe revealed that both the European brands, Opel and Vauxhall have registered huge loss of $256 million and has confirmed that jobs of the workers would remain unaffected at the Development Centre that at present employs over 6500 employees.
Mr. Stracke said in a statement, "We are in talks with our (GM) colleagues in Detroit and Shanghai to see if we could build Chevrolet vehicles in Europe to improve capacity utilisation." He further added that the company is planning to produce Chevrolet badged vehicles in Europe intended for sale in the US and Chinese markets and strategic plans will be devised for the re-establishment of Opel brand in North Africa, South America, Australia and the Middle East nations coupled with endeavoring to augment its brand preference in the countries of Israel, China, Russia and Turkey.
Mr. Stracke also said the the exports planned to be made out of Europe will not be enough for the attaining the full capacity utilisation. Instead, the automaker is deciding to utilise the plants on a three shift basis in future so as to efficiently incorporate the production of Astra compact model and thereby curtail the production costs considerably.
