GM CEO says she is committed to Chinese market and will push forward in 'overhyped' electric vehicle sector

General Motors CEO Mary Barra said that the company will push forward with its operations in China despite a whopping loss in the country in the first quarter of 2024.

Barra recently visited China and promised that GM remained committed to the market, which has been a mainstay for the manufacturer since 1997. A $106 million loss in the first quarter in China was just GM's third quarterly loss in the far east in the last 15 years, CNBC reported, but the company announced that it expects the numbers to turn around.

GM CFO Paul Jacobson reportedly told investors that the company expects similar or slightly lower than $446 million in profit, which is what it garnered in China in 2023.

However, 2023 was the lowest year for equity income for GM in China since at least 2012, but this has come at a much smaller market share. GM's percentage of the market has shrunk from nearly 15% down to 8.6% in the last decade, lowering expectations.

Still, 2023's numbers were more than $230 million lower than 2022, despite only losing 1.2% of the market share in that time. Comparatively, GM's income in China stayed relatively the same between 2014 and 2018 despite its market share dropping by about 1%.

At the same time, Barra claimed that GM is going to be charging forward with electrical vehicle production. The CEO told Bloomberg that she planned on making at least one EV model for every GM brand while trying to convince America's middle class that electric cars are right for them.

"I think it was overhyped and now it's probably underhyped, and the truth is somewhere in the middle," Barra said of the EV market. "Growth has slowed, but it's still growing."

If consumers are confused by Barra's recent statements, they wouldn't be wrong. In 2022 she told Bloomberg that GM was purposely taking its time in the EV market, but in 2024 she says she wishes the company hadn't done so.

"If I had a do-over, I would have — even though we were moving , I would have accelerated the pace."

Of course, this is far away from what General Motors announced in October 2023. At that time, the company announced it would be slowing production of EVs after losing $1 billion from the autoworkers' strike, with Jacobson stating that GM would be "moderating the acceleration of EV production" to protect pricing.

Barra also said that the company planned on reducing electric vehicle product spending while simultaneously slowing the launch of several models in order to cut costs. The company also noted that it was abandoning targets to build 100,000 electric vehicles in the second half of 2023 and another 400,000 in the first six months of 2024.

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