Buick-GMC dealers’ primary task this year? Turn already-tight inventory as quickly as possible.
“I don’t see the landscape being massively different [from 2020], which on the one hand is a concern. But on the other hand, this is a massive opportunity,” Duncan Aldred, vice president of global Buick-GMC told Automotive News. At Thursday’s make meeting, he urged dealers to adopt strategies to sell inventory faster. “The core root to success this year has got to be fast stock turn.”
Many Buick-GMC dealers sold vehicles before they arrived from the factory last year, which reduced dealers’ floorplan costs, he said.
GMC sold a record 253,016 Sierra pickups in the U.S. last year even as the average transaction price rose. GMC says it expects to continue gaining market share, but Aldred doubts that inventory will return to the levels seen before the pandemic and the fall 2019 UAW strike.
GMC started 2021 with a three-day supply of heavy-duty Sierras, Aldred said. “You might expect that out of the Corvette. We wouldn’t necessarily expect that one of the hottest vehicles in the whole industry was a heavy-duty GMC Sierra, but it was,” he said. “To go from three days to what you might consider a historic norm of a 90-day supply, that is a long way.”
A microchip shortage has hampered automakers’ ability to build stocks even more in recent weeks. General Motors has temporarily shut plants but is prioritizing production of pickups, SUVs and EVs.
Despite low inventory, Buick and GMC aim to increase share with new products, including the GMC Hummer EV and a redesigned Buick Envision, said Todd Ingersoll, dealer council chairman and CEO of Ingersoll Automotive.
“We’ve got some exciting new products,” Ingersoll said, “that we think, even through chip shortages, by the end of the year, we will be able to grow market share.”