GM will announce the sale of Opel on Thursday.
General Motors recently has been finalizing the deal to sell the Hummer brand to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machine Company. It now appears that Opel will likely be following suit as GM continues the downsizing of their total brands.
GM will be announcing on Thursday that Opel will be finally sold to Canada’s Magna and Russia’s Sberbank. The two companies will acquire controlling ownership with a 55 percent share, while GM retains 35 percent. The remaining 10 percent will be given to Opel employees as incentive for the $1.2 billion in worker concessions.
The Opel sale has met with some resistance from other countries, such as the UK, Spain and Germany which all believe that Magna will close down factories in those countries. They have all pledged to withhold any aid unless jobs were secured in those factories.
Regardless of what other countries think, Opel will most likely cut about 1/5 of it’s workforce which will drop the total employees to about 40,000. Magna and Sberbank will spend at least 500 million euro’s on Opel, with most of the funding going toward expanding the brand into the Russian Market.
Related posts:
- Car News – GM approves sell for majority ownership of Opel brand. Last week we reported that General Motors was close to...
- Car News – GM close to finding buyer for the Opel brand? It appears that General Motors is beginning to narrow down...
- Car News – New owners say Hummer could be headquartered in Detroit. General Motors is currently under negotiation with Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy...
- Car News – GM to spend $230M on Chevy Volt, Cruze Plants General Motors announced that they will be spending $230 million...
- Car News – Penske completing puchase of Saturn tomorrow Recent reports are coming in that Roger Penske, the owner...
