GM Posts Strong Q2 Results, Net Income Up 157 Percent

Thursday said it posted net income attributable to common shareholders of $2.9 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year ago.

GM has been posting profitable quarter after profitable quarter for the past few years, on the strength of strong pickup truck and SUV sales in the US.

“This was an outstanding quarter for GM”, Chairman and CEO Mary Barra said in a statement.

General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) announced impressive second quarter of fiscal 2016 (2QFY16) earnings results before the opening bell today.

But the company’s financial results show no signs of slowing, notching more than a dozen postbankruptcy records in the second quarter.

It was the fifth straight quarter the automaker beat earnings estimates by at least 15 percent. That number is important because it’s the number that GM and the UAW use to compute profit-sharing checks at the end of the year.

In terms of the outlook for the 2016 full year, the company expects to have EPS in the range of $5.50 to $6.00, up from the previous range of $5.25 to $5.75. Operating profit was $1.86 a share, soundly beating Wall Street expectations for $1.49 a share.

Geographically, the company kept its momentum in North American and earned $3.6 billion before taxes in its home market.

Revenue: FactSet analysts are expecting sales to reach $38.34 billion in the quarter, compared with $36.67 billion in the second quarter of 2015.

The company’s chief economist in late June said the company was not changing its financial forecast for Europe this year, though he said GM would continue to study Brexit implications and could make sales and production plan adjustments. In China, GM and its joint ventures delivered a record 1.81 million vehicles during the first half of the year, an increase of 5.3 percent.

All told, GM sold 1.44 million vehicles in the USA for the first half of 2016.

Strength internationally should offset another, more broad concern that has been lingering over GM: the idea that US sales are peaking and that the oversized results in North America are unlikely to last in this highly cyclical industry. US retail market share rose 0.4 percentage points through June, the largest retail share gain of any full-line automaker.