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Reeling from losses, GM announces new discounts

DETROIT - Hoping to boost sales, General Motors Corp. on Monday announced a new discount program of "Red Tag" prices that could knock from several hundred dollars to more than $4,440 off the list price of some of its 2005 and 2006 model cars and light trucks through Jan. 3.

The announcement comes as the world's largest automaker has been running up billion-dollar losses and reporting a declining North American market share.

Its shares have traded as low as $22.74 in recent days, their lowest level in about 13 years.

Under the new incentives, dealers will post fixed maximum prices on most models of the Buick, Chevrolet, GMC and Pontiac nameplates, GM said in a statement.

The GM announcement can be expected to trigger a new round of price cuts across the car industry, even by Asian producers that have been gaining market share at the expense of the U.S. Big Three, said analyst Noriaki Hirakata of Morgan Stanley in Tokyo.

"Japanese - they hate incentives, but they will have to respond," Hirakata said. "Generally, the selling price of light trucks will be under pressure."

GM reported a net loss of $1.6-billion in the third quarter, compared with net income of $315-million a year earlier, as its North American division continued to suffer from high health care costs and falling sales of sport utility vehicles.

International Business Machines Corp. doubled the capacity of the world's fastest computer and built a new supercomputer to claim the top three spots in the rankings of the world's most powerful number-crunchers.

The IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is as powerful as 64,000 laptops and can do 280.6-trillion calculations a second. The computer, developed with the National Nuclear Security Administration, is the world's fastest for the third time, according to the semiannual ranking released Monday.

Supercomputers are used to model and analyze complex systems such as global weather patterns. They outperform mass-produced machines by breaking data into small pieces and processing those bits by using many powerful semiconductors linked together. Chip and computer makers including IBM, Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. develop technology for use in cheaper equipment with the massive machines.

"This is important to IBM because it's a market segment of significant size, so it's financially attractive and composed of customers that push us to do new things that cascade down into product for other market segments as well," said David Turek, IBM's vice president for Deep Computing, in a recent interview.

--Information from the Associated Press and Bloomberg News was used in this report.