Business journalists across the globe can exhale a sigh of relief because they now have a story to fill their pages through the dog-days of summer: the possible General Motors and Nissan-Renault alliance. GM Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner and his counterpart at Renault and Nissan Motor Carlos Ghosn announced over the weekend that their companies would take about 90 days to review a three-way alliance. Now journalists can spend time writing analysis pieces of what a three-way deal might look like or how Ford, Honda or Toyota will respond.
As a matter of fact, Business Week has wasted no time already writing speculative stories about the next move of the world's second-largest car company Toyota. Business Week suggested Toyota may try to break up the triangle by seeking its own alliance with GM — not such a wacky idea considering the General and Toyota have been making cars together in California for about two decades. Some of those co-creations include the mid-80s Chevy Nova and the early 90s Geo and later Chevy Prizm (all three were really Toyota Corollas) and today's Pontiac Vibe sports wagon (aka Toyota Matrix). At one point, Toyota even imported the Chevy Cavalier for sale in Japan.
Of course for the truly outlandish, check out Web site Breakingviews, which has a story speculating on the prospects of a Ford-GM merger. To thwart antitrust concerns, Breakingviews points to the Maytag-Whirlpool merger that consolidated the remaining U.S. appliance makers. Another deal to justify a Ford-GM merger would be the 1997 merger of Boeing and McDonald Douglas essentially consolidating America's remaining largest commercial aerospace companies. After all, foreign competition was used as the main reason to approve both the Boeing and Whirlpool deals, so GM and Ford attorneys could argue the same point. Of course, merging two troubled companies only creates an even larger troubled company, but Breakingviews offers analysis that suggests such logic may be flawed thanks to cost savings that the two could attain.
At any rate, Wagoner and Ghosn have made themselves the darlings of business reporters everywhere.—Matthew Wurtzel
See story from Breakingviews
See story from Business Week
See story from The New York Times
See GM DealWatch
Continue reading below
