Steven Landry puts October U.S. sales in perspective

Posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 4:48 PM EST.

Steven Landry
Executive Vice President – North American Sales
The industry in the month of October was off 31 percent, and that’s a big drop year-over-year. As a matter of fact, we measure our sales in annual units, and that’s 11 million annual units. So that’s a very low month—a record low month. But don’t be discouraged. I think we’re getting toward the end of these low months that we’ve been looking at. You know, in the past, if you got anywhere near a minus five percent – that’s bad news. Now, the industry off 31 percent—Chrysler sales were off 35 percent. We’re narrowing the gap between what the industry is off and we are off. And we’re battling some pretty some fairly significant things that are unique to us. In those numbers, for example, we do less leasing than the other car makers do today. So that’s a headwind that we have in front of us. We also have situations where—we don’t have as many small cars playing in the small segments in the market right now, and our dealers, I think are doing the best they can with the product they have. We’re doing a pretty good job maintaining our share on our SUVs, and also increasing our share on minivans. The Town & Country and Caravan are doing very well. And the other headwind we have is obviously the rumor mill in the marketplace. That’s not easy to battle through—not only for the employees of our company, but also for our dealers for the same level of nervousness while we go through this situation.

Our big highlight for the month of October is that our Patriot sales hit 3,300 units. That’s very strong. Our Town & Country sales—7,700 units for the month. Journey sales at 4,400 units. These are the newer vehicles that have just come out in the last few years, if you will. And this year, we launched the Dodge Challenger. We sold almost 3,000 Dodge Challengers this month, and we only have 3,700 in stock, so we’re basically selling every Challenger that’s coming in. So if you take just those vehicles, for example, to give credit to the newer vehicles that are coming to market—the Challenger, the Town & Country and the Dodge Caravan, the Dodge Journey, all the vehicles coming out of the Belvedere Plant—the Patriot, the Compass and the Caliber. These vehicles are all doing very, very well in the marketplace, and will continue to do well as the month of November and December brings us to the end of the calendar year, and hopefully into a place where our business starts to grow again.

Yes, as a matter of fact, we not only have the normal employee program in the marketplace, but we have looked at all of the vehicles, such as SUVs—all of our popular vehicles—minivans. We have an increased employee incentive for the month of November, So, for all the employees that are out there, it’s not just the employee program and the normal incentives, but there’s also—and you can see this on Dashboard Anywhere—the incremental incentives we have for employees in the month of November. There’s a lot of them—too many to mention in one sentence. It’s on over 14 models that we have these incremental incentives.

I’d like to thank all the employees for everything that you’ve done in the month of October. And I’m talking to not only the field people and the Business Centers, and everyone that calls on dealers, but also anyone that works in Auburn Hills and all of our assembly plants. I know we’re driving you crazy a little bit with our scheduling changes, and some of them are weekly. You’re adapting very well, and we appreciate that. But in these kinds of times when we’re not sure where the industry is going, change and adaptation is very important to the marketplace, I’d like to thank you. In this kind of market for everything that you’re doing. The month of November will certainly be a lot of change this month, and hopefully it will be for the better as the industry grows and our sales pick up, and we get into a better place with the industry.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 4:48 PM EST and is filed under Company and tagged Video. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed.