Mr. Levy: From a business perspective, 2007 was a tough year. It was another down year for automotive new vehicle sales. There were 16.5 million new light vehicles sold in 2006 and that number declined to 16.1 million new light vehicles in 2007. That pressured profits on the auto retailers. The difference between some retailers and others is that some were more focused on luxury brands and import brands and those did relatively better in most cases than retailers that were more focused on or had greater exposure to the American brands.
TWST: It was a continuation of trends that we've seen for quite a while?
Mr. Levy: That's correct. These market share losses of the domestic Detroit
Three - General Motors (GM, **), Ford (F, ***) and Chrysler LLC, which is now
private - have hurt their dealers. In fact, market share declines were not just
because of smaller industry volume but were also from lost market share.
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