shock6906

The airline industry has been purchasing fuel futures in humongous amounts (I don't recall the exact number, so I don't want to misquote), so I don't see why they'd be any less willing to sell to Chrysler.

JakeRobb

Then don't think of it as a comparison. It's just a list. (Perhaps the name "scorecard" is leading you to compare. Should we rename it?)

Personally, I'm interested in the health of all three companies. How each fares relative to the others is entirely unimportant to me, but it's nice to get all the info in the same place.

JasonD

Interesting way to look at it and I don't mean to argue or anything, but doesn't market share come into play? Would it be a more accurate example to also consider that there are only a limited amount of resources in the hospital (which there is), just like there is a limited amount of people buying cars out there right now?

JakeRobb

If you're considering market share, then we should be including all of the car companies. Considering that Toyota, Honda, and all of the others have such a large collective share of the market, we can consider the big three independently.

Basically, if you want to pull market share in, then you have to consider all of the major players in the market.

JasonD

I was, actually. I lost sight of the thread title criteria and was thinking big picture.

Eric Bryant

Market share percentage is an interesting way to size up the performance of one automaker to another, but it doesn't mean a whole lot - absolute production numbers (and the revenue that each unit brings) has much more bearing on short-term financial performance.

In other words, an automaker that is increasing market share in a declining market may be doing well vs. the competition, but perhaps won't be experiencing good financial performance. On the other hand, decreasing market share in a growing market might mean good short-term financial performance, but is potentially problematic later on when the market contracts.

That was a bit of a rambling answer, but hopefully it helps

guionM

I was going to make the same point. Don't worry, it wasn't a rambling answer.

Ford gave up trying to gain market share, and instead has been focusing on shrinking themselves to profitability. Buying out half their workforce was a key to this, as was shutting down about half their large truck & SUV factories.

In the late 90s, Ford made far more than GM while selling about half as many vehicles. Chrysler, the smallest of the big 3 by far, had even more money than Ford if memory serves correct.

A similar example involves a globally known restaurant. 2 stores in this example. One does twice the volume of the other one. The bigger one was seeing consistant increases of sales while the smaller one's sales were pretty consistant with the previous year. Yet the one with less volume clears more money. Labor and food costs were much lower per $100 in sales than the larger one, and due to better management, it actually pulled in more total cash (not just cash percentage of sales) than the larger store which saw steady increases of sales over the previous year.

Guess which manager moved up, and which one was replaced.

Market share and even growth in sales is nice, but if you aren't making any money, you are still a failure.

In any and every company, profit is always number 1.