Welcome to today's edition of the Daily 5.
Starting tomorrow, the auto industry's many stakeholders are going to get barraged by third-quarter earnings reports from automakers, suppliers, dealer groups and others.
General Motors will be the lead-off hitter tomorrow morning.
For many news organizations, earnings stories are all about Wall Street expectations, so the news gets covered based on whether a company has a "beat" or a "miss" in a certain quarter. That's what equity investors want to know.
But Automotive News tries to account for a corporation's many different non-Wall Street stakeholders when covering earnings. Examples could be coverage of sales volumes, litigation payouts, labor costs, one-time charges and new business backlogs.
Innumerable other disclosures figure into analyzing the overall health of a publicly traded company.
And, of course, you have to read the fine print and the last page of any earnings report to see what disclosures certain companies don't want anyone to notice.
Meanwhile, we have plenty of other stories in our report today.
Pete Bigelow reports from Austin, Texas, that there are more plans ahead for Volkswagen's long-awaited ID Buzz electric van.
Also from Texas, we have two stories from Larry Vellequette about Toyota Motor Corp.'s plans to build an axle plant for its truck assembly operations in San Antonio.
The odd twist about this project?
The Texas plant's existing axle supplier in Arkansas, Hino Motors, is part of the Toyota group of companies. Plant closings are a rare thing for Toyota — particularly when it's a plant that supplies a key Toyota assembly line.
In any case, Toyota is starting the hiring process in San Antonio and the company is seeking military veterans for those jobs.
Finally, from Bloomberg, we have this story about Chinese automaker BYD's latest move in Brazil — a market traditionally seen as having formidable potential for auto sales growth.
That's it for now. Have a great rest of your day!
If you want to view this story in your browser, click here.
— Philip Nussel, online editor
