On January 6,
2014, your pension plan subcommittee, consisting of Mike Powell and Garry
Marnoch, met with Dave Courtney--Employment Cost Analysis Manager, and Jeff
Rolfs--Vice President Finance and Chief Financial Officer to review the performance
of our pension plan for the quarter ended September 30, 2013.
Overall our
pension fund is slowly improving.
During the
third quarter the plan assets decreased by $339 million as payments from
the plan exceeded the income from investments and contributions from
GMCL. As of the 9/1/12 valuation, the solvency ratio is 76% of liabilities.
With rising interest rates and good asset returns we expect that the 9/1/13
filing will show improvement.
The GM Canada salaried pension plan continues to beat
the benchmarks in most investment categories. Overall there was a 1.3%
return for the third quarter with an annual return of 2.6%.
This topped the overall benchmark by 0.2% for the quarter and 0.7%
annually. The plan outperformed the benchmarks for the last five
quarters, and for nine of the most recent eleven quarters. Virtually
break-even to benchmark performance in the five-year view continues to
reflect the market collapse of 2008-9 and will drop out of the calculations as
the window moves forward.
A very
positive development is that there has been a significant improvement in
investment performance stability. When investing for pensions, stability
is critical, and has improved significantly since 2008. Stability is the
purpose of the derisking strategy adopted for the plan since the financial
crisis.
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