By Ben Klayman
DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co's (N:GM) management has been too slow to make changes that would improve profitability and too vague in setting near-term milestones for performance, the leader of an investor group seeking a seat on the board said on Tuesday.
"There is absolutely a lack of confidence amongst investors of the company achieving its targets," Harry Wilson told Reuters. "There's a substantial amount of shareholder frustration."
GM revealed Wilson's board aspirations earlier on Tuesday. The former member of the U.S. auto task force that helped restructure the company in bankruptcy in 2009 also plans to propose at GM's annual meeting in June that it launch an $8 billion share buyback program.
Wilson said the pace of change at GM "has been quite slow" and the No. 1 U.S. automaker was still underperforming its potential. He said GM's 2016 and 2020 profit margin targets are admirable but the company has failed to say how it will hit them.
"They put out these multi-year targets with nothing in between and it makes it hard to evaluate whether they're on track or not," he said. "As a result people really discount GM's ability to get to those long-term targets."
Wilson said GM has "way more cash than it needs, and that creates an opportunity to buy back a stock that's very cheap." He said the company would likely end 2015 with about $30 billion in cash, which suggests it will have at least $10 billion in excess cash, if not more.
Wilson called the proposal for an $8 billion buyback "incredibly conservative" and said his group, which includes David Tepper's Appaloosa Management and three other hedge funds, had wrestled with proposing a larger buyback program.