Autoblog

The business world has always confounded us for being a place where one can celebrate with champagne after not posting a profit for three months, if only for the fact that you didn't lose as much money as people thought you would. Such is the case with General Motors, which today announced that it had lost "only" $115 million this quarter. Those pesky "special items" in the ledger amount to $644 million for GM and include money that's been spent to aid the reorganization of Delphi and "goodwill impairment" on GMAC (from what we gather, it's a reevaluation of the finance company's worth). Excluduing special items, GM actually posted a net income of $529 million on revenue of $48.8 billion, which is a marked improvement over last year's adjusted loss of $1.1 billion and comes mainly from the good old fashioned practice of selling cars and trucks. General Motors also was able to fine tune the amount of money it expects to spend on Delphi, which previously was thought to be between $5.5 and $12 billion, but now looks to be between $6.0 and $7.5 billion.

On the auto side of things, GM's global market share was 13.9% percent in Q3, up slightly from the second quarter but below the 14.4% it recorded in Q3 2005. In the all important North American market, however, GM captured 25.1% of consumers' hearts and wallets, the best quarter it's had this year. GM North America still reported a loss of $367 million in Q3, but again, it's an improvement of $1.3 billion over last year this time and was acheived despite producing 96,000 fewer vehicles (likely the result of lower rental and fleet sales).

You can check out GM's full press release for more details after the jump.

[Source: GM]