GM Vows to Increase Minority Dealers by 40% : Autos: The company currently has the lowest percentage of minority dealerships among Detroit’s Big Three.
Reaching out to the ethnic communities that make up a growing share of its market, General Motors Corp. said Tuesday that it plans to increase the ranks of its minority dealers by 40% over the next three years.
“Increased minority participation in our dealerships is vital to achieving GM’s prime objective of the 1990s--satisfying car and truck owners better than any other manufacturer,” GM President Lloyd E. Reuss said in announcing plans to raise the car maker’s number of black, Latino, Asian and American Indian dealers from 192 to 268 by December, 1993.
Minority business leaders applauded the auto makers’ initiative as a step in the right direction. But they noted that the proportion of minority car customers will still far outstrip the proportion of minority dealers--even if GM meets its goal of boosting minority ownership from 2% to 2.8% of its 9,595 dealerships.
“What they’re doing is fine, but parity is still a long way off,” said Frank Medina, executive director of the Latin Business Assn. in Los Angeles. “The Latino population in Southern California, in particular, is way above that.”
In the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, Latinos are an estimated 32.8% of the population; together, the minority groups that are the focus of GM’s program make up about 23.3% of the U.S. population.
With the largest dealership base of the Big Three U.S. auto makers, GM has the lowest percentage of minority dealers.
By comparison, 5.5% of Ford Motor Co.’s dealers are minorities, as are 2.5% of Chrysler Corp.’s. Of the U.S. dealerships of Toyota Motor Corp., the biggest Japanese auto maker, 2.6% are minority-owned.
Under the new plan, a steering committee of GM dealers and company officials will hold regular meetings to discuss how to most effectively recruit new minority dealers and enable existing minority dealers to stay in business.
Financial assistance may be available if needed, a GM official said, but most of the aid will come in the form of management assistance and counseling. A recently created department will coordinate the expansion of minority dealer services.
Ruben Baca, a member of GM’s Minority Dealer Advisory Council who owns a Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealership in Blen, N.M., said he was thrilled with the announcement, although somewhat skeptical about whether the company could meet its objective.
“I think that goal might be a little high,” Baca said. “It takes a lot of training for a person to become a dealer. It’s probably one of the most difficult businesses to get into. But it was wonderful news.”
Tony March, owner of a Buick dealership in Hartford, Conn., and chairman of the advisory council, said the new steering committee will be a forum to aid minority dealers.
“In the past,” March said, “everybody was doing everything by themselves, individually. Say a minority dealer had a problem. He would have to deal with all the GM divisions separately. Now, there’s a member of each car division on the steering committee, so once a month we can all sit together in one room and discuss the best way to do things.”
