DETROIT -- After nearly two decades of losses in Europe, General Motors appears ready to all but abandon the continent in order to seek bigger payoffs with investments in autonomous vehicles and the more lucrative U.S. market instead.
It's a radical pivot for a company that historically tried to dominate every global market it could as well as a sign of how dramatically the industry is being upended by shifting attitudes about transportation.
GM has been in this spot before. But both the company and its circumstances are significantly different now. A 2009 deal to sell the Opel division -- born of desperation and ultimately canceled -- envisioned GM ultimately finding a way back in Europe through its surviving brands.
Today's GM works from a position of financial strength but with far less patience or sentimentality. Under CEO Mary Barra and President Dan Ammann, GM is proving that it's increasingly willing to walk away from declining segments and unprofitable markets -- even one as sprawling and influential as Europe -- so that it can pour more of its finite resources into advanced technology, high-margin SUVs, Cadillac and promising new revenue streams.
"In order to fund that, we need to go and find the money somewhere else. And we need to decide what we're not going to do," Ammann told analysts and investors during a presentation last month. "We don't need to play in every place. So we may not invest in certain markets or places going forward. The important message here is the mindset."
GM already has shown that discipline by ending or limiting operations in Russia, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand. It's also reconsidering investments in India and Brazil.
The strategy has helped the automaker nearly double its return on invested capital, from 15.4 percent in 2014, Barra's first year as CEO, to 28.9 percent last year. Automakers' historically poor returns on invested capital were at the heart of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne's 2015 call for industry consolidation, and improving that metric can help keep GM in control of its own destiny.