General Motor’s Hummer brand for sale

• Advocate business staff
• Published: Sep 24, 2008 - UPDATED: 2 p.m.

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DETROIT (AP) — General Motors Corp. is planning to put its Hummer truck brand, which has a manufacturing plant in northwest Louisiana, up for sale, along with a Strasbourg, France, manufacturing operation.

Company Treasurer Walter Borst says in a slide presentation for the Deutsche Bank Leveraged Finance Conference that marketing materials for both operations will be distributed in October.

It was unclear what that means for the Shreveport plant, which has gone through a layoff of 700 of its 1,946 workers.

Gov. Bobby Jindal headed a trip to Detroit in August after the automaker announced the layoff. He returned saying another round of layoffs is unlikely and that the manufacturer would go forward with the production of the smaller Hummer H3T pickup in Shreveport.

Jindal had said GM is still reeling from the decline in SUV and truck sales, especially in the Hummer line. GM reported a $15.5 billion loss in the most recent quarter.

“GM’s got to make some corporate level decisions about product mix,” Jindal had said after his visit.

In the future, he said, auto plants will need to have a much more flexible manufacturing capacity to react to changes in consumer patterns.

The governor’s trip coincided with an announcement that GM plans to spend millions of dollars on an Ohio plant to build a new small car called the Chevrolet Cruze.

Converting the Shreveport plant into a facility for more fuel-efficient vehicles would require a similar significant investment, Jindal had said.

He said he offered the automaker incentives, including cash, to make the Shreveport facility viable.

Jindal said GM spent more than $1 billion on the Shreveport plant before gas prices soared.

The slides shown in France, posted on GM’s Web site Wednesday, say the assets under review for sale are worth $2 billion to $4 billion.

The presentation also says GM continues to review other asset sales and will make more announcements in the fourth quarter.