Holden, officially GM Holden Ltd, is an Australian automaker based in Port Melbourne, Victoria. The company was originally independent but since 1931 has been a subsidiary of General Motors (GM). Holden has taken charge of vehicle operations for General Motors in Australasia and, on behalf of GM, holds partial ownership of GM Daewoo in South Korea. Over the years, Holden has offered a broad range of locally produced vehicles, supplemented by various imported GM models. In the past, Holden has offered rebadged Nissan and Toyota models in sharing arrangements.
Holden car bodies are manufactured at Elizabeth, South Australia, and engines are produced at Port Melbourne, Victoria (Fishermens Bend). Historically, production or assembly plants were operated in all mainland states of Australia: Acacia Ridge, Queensland, Dandenong, Victoria, Mosman Park, Western Australia, Pagewood, New South Wales, and Woodville, South Australia (body production only). Until 1990, Holden New Zealand also operated a plant based in Petone. The consolidation of car production at Elizabeth, South Australia, was completed in 1988, but some assembly operations continued at Dandenong until the mid-1990s. Although Holden's involvement in exports has fluctuated since the 1950s, the declining sales of large cars in Australia has led the company to look to international markets to increase profitability; in 2006, exports alone accounted for almost AU$1.3 billion in earnings.
The company's trend of importing many of their models from Opel in Germany continued until 2005, but to increase profitability, Holden looked to the South Korean Daewoo brand for replacements after acquiring a 44.6% stake in the company in 2002. Holden had already established close research and design links with Daewoo, with whom it exported the large Statesman model. In 2005, the Opel-sourced Barina was replaced by the Daewoo Kalos, which continued to be sold under the Barina nameplate. The Viva, based on the Daewoo Lacetti, replaced the entry-level Holden Astra Classic, although a new Astra launched in 2004 was offered as more of an up-market model. In 2006 Holden introduced the Captiva, a crossover SUV manufactured by Daewoo. After discontinuing the Frontera and Jackaroo in 2003, Holden was only left with one four-wheel drive model: the Adventra, a Commodore-based station wagon. The third Holden model to be replaced with a South Korean alternative was the Vectra, replaced by the mid-size Epica in April 2007.
The 1997 VT Commodore received its first major update in 2002 with the VY. The VZ was launched in 2004, and introduced GM's High Feature engine, known as the Alloytec V6. The new engine was built at Holden's Fishermens Bend plant in Victoria, which opened in 2003 and is capable of producing 900 engines per day. The plant will add $5.2 billion to the Australian economy; exports account for about $450 million annually. The High Feature engine is also found in other models, including the Holden Captiva and Rodeo. By 2006, Holden had replaced the Commodore with a new all-Australian model, in contrast to previous generations' Opel-sourced platforms adapted both mechanically and in size for the local market.
Holden first began to export vehicles in 1954, sending the FJ to New Zealand. New Zealand is now Holden's largest export market, with the large Commodore model toping the sales charts from-time-to-time. To combat declining large car sales in Australia due to rising fuel costs, the reduction of import tariffs and demographic changes, Holden began to broaden their export potential by catering their full-size Commodore and Statesman models to left-hand drive markets. In Brunei, Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand and parts of the Middle East, Commodores are badged as Chevrolet Luminas, and in Brazil as the Chevrolet Omega. The larger Statesman model is also sold alongside the Lumina in the Middle East as the Chevrolet Caprice, and previously in China as the Buick Royaum, before being replaced by the Park Avenue, A modified version of the Monaro coupé has been sold as the Pontiac GTO in the United States and under the Monaro name through Vauxhall dealerships in the United Kingdom. Since the Monaro's dismissal, Vauxhall has begun to sell the HSV Clubsport R8, badged as the Vauxhall VXR8, and Pontiac has chosen both the V6 and V8 versions of the Commodore to be exported as the G8 from 2008 onwards. Holden's move into international markets has been profitable; export revenue increased from $973 million in 1999 to just under $1.3 billion in 2006.
