General Motors Corp aims to stop losing money in Europe this year, ending a string of losses since 1999, Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said on Wednesday.
"Our objective for 2006 in Europe is to break even or do better," he told reporters at the Geneva car show. He said this excluded restructuring charges, which he did not expect to be large.
GM is cutting its European workforce by around a fifth to address the losses and slack market demand. Wagoner said the restructuring programme was on track but added GM had to keep working on its competitiveness. For the intermediate term, he said he wanted the world's largest automaker to reach a 5 percent profit margin in Europe.
Including special items of $841 million, GM Europe lost $1.216 billion in 2005 versus a loss of $976 million in 2004, when it took $234 million in one-off charges.
Wagoner declined to go into details on the status of negotiations to sell a stake in its GMAC financing arm, saying he did not want to speculate on the outcome of a complex deal.