General Motors has posted a whopping $9.6 billion loss in the fourth quarter which pushed its 2008 loss to $30.9 billion.
GM said the results reflected the global economic crisis and industry-wide collapse in vehicle demand, and warned that 2009 will also be a 'challenging' year.
'2008 was an extremely difficult year for the US and global auto markets, especially the second half,' GM's Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said.
'These conditions created a very challenging environment for GM and other car makers, and led us to take further aggressive and difficult measures to restructure our business,' he said.
'We expect these challenging conditions will continue through 2009, and so we are accelerating our restructuring actions,' he added.
General Motors says that its fourth quarter revenues dropped to $30.8 billion from $46.8 billion in 2007.
The 2008 results were still an improvement on those for 2007, however, when GM posted a $43.3 billion loss as annual revenues fell to $149 billion from $180 billion in 2007.
