GM Venezuela Has No Cars Left to Sell

While in the United States the company still strives to cope with bankruptcy, GM is performing a lot better in overseas markets, such as Venezuela, where it has almost no cars to sell. Although it might sound like surprisingly good news, it's not, as the main cause of the current situation is actually the lack of currency from the Venezuelan government, as reported by just-auto.com. This means suppliers are still unpaid, which forced General Motors to idle production.

In other words, General Motors managed to sell almost all its cars due to a halt in production and, in case things do no get back on track soon, it could result in a huge loss for the US-based automaker.

"We shut down our operations on Monday. We owe almost US$1.0 billion to our suppliers, over 90% of which is debts are over 290 days old," GM Venezolana President and Managing Director Ronaldo Znidarsis has exclusively told just-auto.

In 2007 and 2008, GM sold a total of 151,115 and 90,118 units in Venezuela, respectively. This year, the company projected a total output of 140,000 vehicles but, due to the lack of currency, such a goal sounds impossible. In the first five months of the year, GM sold only 31,622 units.

"If we were able to pay our suppliers today, we could restart the factory at the end of September or the beginning of October. It will take us that long to replenish our component supplies," Znidarsis said.

"But we have to be able to guarantee our payments with suppliers. We can only restart production if we pay off our debts of around US$1 billion and if we are able to guarantee payments to them for the rest of the year. That is why we have gone to the National Assembly to ask for more support in paying our suppliers."