Big profit for General Motors, Chrysler plants to stay open
General Motors beat predictions and posted a profit of $1 billion for the first quarter of 2012. That's down more than 68 percent from the company's first quarter profit from last year, according to the Detroit News.
The Detroit Free Press reports it's the company's ninth straight quarterly profit:
“It’s a long-term path that we’re on to get to the profitability levels that we want,” Dan Ammann, GM’s chief financial officer, told reporters this morning. “This is a solid quarter: revenue growth, profit growth, margin growth, cash flow improvement.”
And with more signs of a humming auto industry, Chrysler says it plans to keep three plants it typically idles during the summer open. From the Detroit News:
Chrysler Group LLC is canceling the traditional summer shutdown at three more of its factories to keep up with demand for its hot-selling cars and crossovers. The Toledo Supplier Park in Ohio, the Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois and Chrysler's plant in Toluca, Mexico, will join Detroit's Jefferson North plant in working through the summer.
Auction for drilling rights coming up
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources says it's holding an auction in Lansing next week for oil and gas drilling rights on about 108-thousand acres in 23 counties. The DNR says it holds the auctions twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. The proceeds from state-owned mineral lease rights go to buy land for public use, maintenance and improvements of state and local parks, and care of state fishery and wildlife habitats.
Cherry retailers look elsewhere for fruit
The bizarre warm weather coupled with a late freeze wiped out a good portion of Michigan's cherry crop, as Bob Allen reported for the Environment Report.
Lizzy Alfs at AnnArbor.com writes that retailers are searching for another supply:
With the majority of Michigan’s expansive cherry crop destroyed by this weather, Cherry Republic PresidentBob Sutherland said he was forced to think outside the box in order to continue selling his variety of cherry products. His solution: Ordering millions of cherries from the Lublin region in Poland.
