General Motors Production will stop again for two weeks as a result of the shortage of parts by local suppliers who cannot make payments for their imports to foreign suppliers.
The measure will take effect from tomorrow and will last until April 14. The automaker had suspended production from the end of December to the beginning of March for the same reason, at its plant in the Santa Fe town of Alvear.
“GM informs that, starting March 27 and until April 14, it will suspend production at its Alverar plant, province of Santa Fe, due to problems with the supply of parts from suppliers affected by payments abroad,” it reported. to Ambit the company
Although with the new government The import regime was made more flexible and the first releases of dollars by the Central Bank began to pay foreign suppliers.the situation of many industries remains delicate for the supply of imported parts and inputs due to the debt accumulated throughout 2023 in foreign trade.
The automotive sector is one of the most affected and last year suffered constant production interruptions due to supply cuts by international express companies that refused to continue sending products due to non-payment.
The end-of-year break and the holiday period caused an impasse in this problem, but the restart of activity comes with complications.
General Motors will postpone the restart of activity due to payment difficulties to foreign suppliers.
The automaker based in the province of Santa Fe had scheduled vacations at the end of December and planned to resume activity starting Monday, January 29. However, the return to production was delayed by the problem of payments abroad.
It only returned to production in early March, two months after the plant closed. Now stop again
The General Motors plant now produces only one model: the Tracker SUV. Until the end of the year, the Cruze was also manufactured, but it was discontinued due to the end of the model’s life.
Last October, General Motors had closed for three weeks for this reason: foreign suppliers cut off merchandise shipments due to the debt accumulated from imports.
The former Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, had ordered that the terminals and auto parts companies finance themselves on their own with the promise that, within a certain period, the Central Bank would deliver the dollars at the official value to cancel those debts.
However, the payment period was always modified and left his administration with an accumulation of debt for the sector that exceeds US$8,000 million.
The government of Javier Milei proposed a bond (Bopreal) to pay this debt over a period of four years, but the many companies abroad do not accept this system and demand the immediate cancellation of that debt to continue supplying. At the same time, it established a payment schedule for imports that have been carried out since December.
This is the problem facing General Motors. There are also other automotive companies with difficulties in normalizing supply.
For example, the automotive company Renault had several local suppliers with problems producing because of the refusal of foreign companies to continue sending supplies. The Córdoba plant – where Nissan’s Frontier pickup is also manufactured – comes with intermittent shutdowns.
Volkswagen was also stopped for two months and resumed production on March 11 in one shift and yesterday it enabled the second shift.
Toyota accepted Bopreal to be able to decompress the debt it has abroad.
The situation is different with the new imports that began to be made from the new government since there is a payment schedule system that began to be carried out this week and the first importers already received dollars at the official value to cancel the new purchases.
Source: Ambito
