General Motors posts better-than-expected earnings and defends latest offer to UAW

Revenue rose to $44.131 billion from $41.889 billion a year ago, also ahead of the $42.482 billion FactSet consensus.

“We were profitable in every region, including China,” Chief Executive Mary Barra said in a letter to shareholders. “And GM International excluding China is on track to deliver significantly higher EBIT-adjusted in 2023 compared to a year ago.”

Electric vehicle sales rose 28% from the second quarter after the company produced 32,000 EVs and made the first deliveries of the Chevrolet Blazer EV. It expects further volume increases in the fourth quarter.

Barra also addressed the current strike by the company’s union-backed workers. Workers at GM
GM,
-1.48%,
Ford Motor Co.
F,
-1.37%
and Stellantis NV
STLA,
+0.32%
have been on strike since mid-September, in a break with the United Auto Workers tradition of striking at one carmaker at a time. On Monday, the union expanded the strike to a Stellantis factory making Ram pickup trucks.

Earlier in October, GM said that the first two weeks of the strike cost it about $200 million.

Analysts at Deutsche Bank, led by Emmanuel Rosner, calculated this week that the strike has cost GM some 61,722 vehicles that otherwise would have been produced.

“Let me address this head on. It’s been clear coming out of COVID that wages and benefits across the U.S. economy would need to increase because of inflation and other factors,” she said.

The company’s current offer “is the most significant that GM has ever proposed to the UAW, and the majority of our workforce will make $40.39 per hour, or roughly $84,000 a year by the end of this agreement’s term.”

GM shares have underperformed the S&P 500
SPX
in recent months and have lost about 12% so far this year. That compares with an advance of around 10% for the index in the year to date.