Chrysler’s Toyota alum has his share of opinions
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Chrysler had a difficult August, with sales falling to just 110,235 vehicles, a 35% drop compared with the same month a year earlier. Its share of the U.S. market, at 8.8%, has fallen within striking distance of Nissan Motor Co., which now has 8.7% thanks to two strong months in a row that catapulted it more than 2 percentage points higher.
But Chrysler’s top salesman, company Vice Chairman and President James E. Press, doesn’t think that sliding market share is necessarily a bad thing. This week, he visited the Los Angeles Times to discuss Chrysler’s new place in the automotive landscape, what it’s like to work for a privately held automaker, the difficulties facing the industry as a whole and how Chrysler, which sells 90% of its vehicles in North America, will find a toehold in the rest of the world.
Press came to Chrysler from Toyota Motor Corp. almost exactly a year ago, on Sept. 6, 2007, and it’s been an awfully busy 12 months for the man. Besides relocating to Detroit from New York, he’s had to dip his toes in waters unfamiliar to a man with a background in imports, such as negotiating labor contracts, dramatically cutting production and shrinking dealerships.
We asked Press: Why is cutting market share a good thing? His response:
Volume is vanity; gross profit is sanity. In an attempt to try and maintain a bigger market share and a higher sales volume, we were making decisions that economically weren’t in the best interest of the company. Fleet sales are an example of that. There’s no economic benefit, because the long-term effect of fleet is to deteriorate your residual values. That’s a case where we could actually sell fewer cars but financially be in better shape.
The old metric of volume doesn’t really work anymore, because the more some companies sell, the more they lose.
For the complete interview, click here.
—Ken Bensinger