oovers, Inc., 2004).
The strategic review of GM presented in this section of the paper considers the company from four perspectives. The Global Review of the company explains the operations of the company in relation to global regions ù Europe, North America and South America, Africa, and Asia. The Functional Review considers GM from an internal perspective ù finance and accounting, marketing, production, information management, and so forth. The Strategy Review identifies strategies followed by GM within the context of Porter's generic strategies, as well as identifying the company's corporate, business, and functional strategies. The Assumptions section identifies management's perceptions of events and developments that will shape the future.
The Global Review of the company explains the operations of the company in relation to global regions ù Europe, North America and South America, Africa, and Asia. The global review of GM's operations is presented in tabular form. Table 1 (which may be found on the following page) provides data on sales revenues broken down by global region, while Table 2 (which may be found on page 6) breaks the revenue down between revenue generated by manufacturing operations and revenues generated by financing operations.
As the data presented in Table 1 indicate, the North American region (80 percent of revenues) and the domestic market in the United States (72.1 percent of revenues) in particular remain the backbone generators of revenue for GM. In contrast, the Asia region (contributing 1.4 percent of revenues) and the domestic market in China (contributing 0.5 percent of revenues) remain bit players in relation to GM's revenue generation.
Two factors, however, cause the Asia region and the domestic market in China to be much more important to GM that the 2003 revenue generation data indicate. The first factor is the rate of growth in the Asia region and especially in the domestic...