Saab To GM; No Mas

FRANKFURT, June 23, 2007; Reuters reported that Swedish carmaker Saab reduced its annual sales targets as the General Motors unit tries to reach break-even, the head of GM Europe said in an advance abstract of a report in Automotive News Europe on Saturday.

"There is a natural limit where you can earn," Carl-Peter Forster, president of General Motors Europe and chairman of Saab told Automotive News Europe. "Therefore, we have much reduced our volume ambitions, to 160,000 to 170,000."

Earlier targets set by Forster's predecessor Peter Augustsson, who left the company in March last year, aimed to sell 250,000 units per year, the magazine said.

Saab sold 133,167 cars worldwide last year and was not profitable, Jan-Ake Jonsson, Saab's managing director, told Automotive News.

"There is still work to do to take out more cost," Jonsson said. "But we are not that far away from break-even."

Separately, sales of GM's Opel Corsa model were going better than expected, GM's Forster told German magazine Focus in an interview.

"We will sell 2007 in Europe more Corsas then planned, instead of 400,000 it will be more than 450,000," Forster told Focus.

Overall, Opel's order intake in Germany was "from January to May clearly worse than in the previous year, while in June it met last year's level", Forster said.