The Fall of Holden PDF

Preview

Summary

Holden Case Study...

Description

The Fall of Holden Holden has been a key staple in Australian history since its origin in 1856. Initially, Holden was founded as a saddlery and soon after would go on to work in the motor body building. Soon after the American car manufacturing juggernaut, General Motors had made a deal with Holden in 1924 to only produce car bodies for General Motors. After this general motors decided to invest more into Australia and merged with Holden to become General Motors Holden in 1931. From this Holden was able to succeed in their selling once they created their purely Australian car named the FX 48-215 that was advertised as the first car “made in Australia, for Australia” as seen in the poster to the right. This model sold 120,000 units in a 6year run and continued its ascent into the PMV market with new models throughout the 50s and 60s. These accelerations had slowed down in 1980 forcing Holden to close their production plant in Pagewood as a result of increased efficiency in car manufacturing overseas. This lead to a decline in the Australian car manufacturing industry as a whole. These losses continued for Holden as an increase in PMVs from overseas had caused the Australian car industry to further decline. This loss caused Holden to lose out on $290 million and forcing them to close another assembly line forcing 1,400 people out of jobs. To further add to Holden’s misfortunes the GFC had hit in 2008 thus forcing another 500 people out of jobs and decreasing General Motor’s exports from the US by 86%. As Holden was in their slump, the government had provided the company with an estimated $190m grant to stifle their decline with the production of the Chevrolet Cruze. This grant in 2010 was short-lived as the company had announced that they would stop production of Holden vehicles in Australia by 2017. The only sector of Holden that operates in Australia now is a group of 700 employees that are comprised of designers, engineers and technical staff for the Australian market. After this turning point, General Motors produced Holden vehicles overseas and exported these vehicles to Australia. As the sales of Holden vehicles had seen a steady decrease since 2010(especially the Commodore) this forced Holden to stop the production of the Commodore by the end of 2020. This decision was made in December of 2019 and is still receiving backlash to this day. This decision can also be supported by the graph detailing the sales of both Holden vehicles and Commodores in Australia. This consistent decline forced General Motors to make a decision.

On February 17th General Motors had decided to pull out of the right-handed driving market and retire the Holden brand by 2021. This move will lead to the redundancy of 600 workers from both Australia and New Zealand by the end of June 2020....