New Opel CEO’s Top 3 Priorities for GM

On only his third day at work, the CEO of General Motors’s (NYSE:GM) European subsidiary Opel has fully committed his company’s cooperation in moving forward to reverse a decade’s worth of losses, and highlighted three priorities that he feels will spin the company’s fortunes around.

Karl-Thomas Neumann believes GM executives will follow through on a 10-year growth strategy aimed at reversing the billions in losses that Opel has experienced.

“We have a new leadership team, a 10-year plan … and we have financing from GM in Detroit that not only allows us to cover our losses but also to invest billions of euros into new product,” Neumann said.

For the year ahead, Neumann expects overall European auto sales to decline, but that Opel should retain its market share and lose slightly less than it did in 2012, which totaled $1.8 billion.

GM CEO Dan Akerson has said many times that he believes GM can revive Opel and that there are no plans to sell the subsidiary, which the company nearly did in 2009. Still, rumors persist about whether GM might unload Opel or fold it into a joint venture with another automaker such as PSA Peugeot Citroen or Fiat, Autonews.com reported.

Here’s a look at Neumann’s three priorities for GM…