GM General Motors Company

By Mike Colias 

Mary Barra took the wheel as head of General Motors Co. about six months before the departing Mark Fields took over at crosstown rival Ford. Much like at Ford, GM's shares have languished.

But Ms. Barra, 55 years old, who became the first woman to run a global car company, continues to enjoy broad support from GM's board and presides over a unified executive team, according to people with knowledge of the company.

GM's directors see the sagging stock price as a symptom of broader investor ambivalence in auto stocks but are comfortable with Ms. Barra's growth plan, one of the people said. They remain supportive of Ms. Barra's dual strategy to bolster GM's core car-making business while also investing in autonomous driving and other future technologies that promise to transform the industry.

GM's struggling stock price belies an improving bottom line. The nation's largest auto maker is on pace to notch its third straight year of record profits, bolstered by strong truck sales in North America and continued strength from China.

A hallmark of Ms. Barra's tenure has been her willingness to shrink a company that once prided itself on being the auto industry's largest. By unloading the albatross of GM's European business -- which lost nearly $20 billion over the last two decades -- and withdrawing from big emerging markets like Russia and India, Ms. Barra has crafted a message to investors that the company is carefully choosing its bets in an industry that has multiplying demands on capital.

GM also has gotten generally higher marks than Ford under Ms. Barra's watch for its future-technology strategy.

Last year, GM acquired autonomous-car developer Cruise Automation. It has grown the startup as an autonomous business unit and now is using Cruise's San Francisco headquarters to establish a Silicon Valley beachhead to attract software engineers in the battle for leadership in self-driving cars.

GM also spent $500 million last year for a stake in ride-hailing company Lyft. The auto maker plans to use its partnership with Lyft to underpin a future network of autonomous vehicles.

"GM's strong data/tech position could transform the business model," Citigroup Inc. analyst Itay Michaeli said in a recent investor note.

Just weeks into her tenure, Ms. Barra's mettle was tested by a high-profile corporate crisis after GM recalled millions of cars with faulty ignition switches now linked to more than 120 deaths. The engineer and GM lifer used the crisis to overhaul GM's safety culture, including the formation of an internal process that encourages employees to speak up if they detect a problem.

"We aren't simply going to fix this and move on," Barra told thousands of employees in June 2014, after an outside investigation into the safety flaw indicted GM's corporate culture. "I never want to put this behind us."

Since then, she has won praise for her progress on changing a corporate culture long viewed as insular and hidebound. Colleagues cite her candor and swift decision making in a company long known for dithering.

Ms. Barra's success in an industry long dominated by men has earned her an unusually high profile for an auto executive. She has appeared on countless magazine covers and has been atop Fortune magazine's list of most powerful women for two straight years.

Still, activist shareholders haven't been as patient with the company's struggling stock price as the board has been.

Ms. Barra is facing down her second proxy fight in as many years, a proposal from David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital to split GM's shares. He also has proposed a slate of three directors. GM shareholders vote on the proposals at the annual meeting June 6.

Write to Mike Colias at Mike.Colias@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 22, 2017 10:17 ET (14:17 GMT)

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