(Image Source: Mibz.com)

BY NOE GANDILLOT

ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY

You're watching multisource business video news analysis from Newsy. 

Saab’s days appear numbered. On Thursday, a court denied the Swedish carmaker’s request to file for bankruptcy. The company has been struggling for months to avoid the inevitable, according to the BBC...

“Saab is running on empty. The last time it actually made cars was in April. Production stopped because unpaid suppliers were not provided with parts. For the third month running, the company is late paying workers’ salaries.”


This is the second time in less than three years that Saab has filed for bankruptcy. The Globalpost.com talked to an analyst that said Saab lost touch with car buyers:

“Saab also wasn’t poised to shift with changes in the automobile market. The company was building larger cars with not much emphasis on fuel economy when consumers began steering toward small vehicles with better gas mileage.”

Euronews has the figures :

“Car industry experts say Saab needs to sell at least 130 000 vehicles a year to break even. Last year, it produced just 32 000, and this year, even fewer. ”


In 1989, Saab was taken over by General Motors. Although GM sold the company two years ago -- but French economic paper La Tribune believes GM to be responsible for the Swedish company’s decline :

"Saab made outstanding, very reputable cars when it was a 100% Swedish-owned company. But its image and performances deteriorated during 20 years, under GM’s harmful direction. Lack of investment and new products have entailed a slow but sure decline, with losses almost all over the period.”


But France’s Le Monde says Saab never had things together:
 

"Over its history, Saab has almost never made profits. (…) The lack of profitability always restrained the company’s development, and sales never took off. At the end of the eighties, Saab was close to bankruptcy. The owners, the Wallenberg, wanted to give up.”

Saab CEO Victor Muller recently told Swedish economic paper Dagens Industri his company was “a cat with nine lives, and I would say this is its 7th". It now seems like it only has one left.



Transcript by Newsy.