Ally aims for 2011 IPO

Ally Financial, the car lender formerly known as GMAC, is hoping to hold an initial public offering next year, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday.

Ally chief Michael Carpenter told investors on a conference call this morning that the IPO “is very clearly within our sights,” the Associated Press reported. “I see it as a 2011 event.”

The remarks come as General Motors prepares for its own initial public offering, as early as the end of this year. GM owned GMAC until it sold most of it in 2006 to private equity firm Cerberus in a last-gasp effort to improve its finances.

That plan didn’t pay off, and the Obama administration took GM through an abbreviated bankruptcy last year in a bid to slim down the company. GMAC, for its part, received not one, not two but three bailouts as the feds propped it up in the name of keeping financing flowing to the hard-hit U.S. car market.

The bailouts left the federal government as Ally’s biggest shareholder, with a 56% stake, in addition to $14 billion worth of preferred stock. Carpenter said Tuesday he would like to convert some of the preferred shares to common stock, as Citigroup did last year.

“We don’t need more capital, we need capital in a different form,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter made the remarks after Ally posted its second straight quarterly profit, following some $10 billion in losses last year. The company said it remains committed to assisting GM “in its mission to sell vehicles,” and stressed that GM’s plan to acquire subprime lender Americredit won’t damage Ally’s relationship with GM.

Not only do Ally and Americredit focus on different customers, Carpenter said. The $3.5 billion Americredit deal serves as a kind of validation for what Ally is trying to do, he claimed.

“I love the AmeriCredit deal because it values our automotive segment alone at $25 billion,” Carpenter said in a conference call with analysts, Bloomberg reported. “I don’t have any doubt about our ability to repay the U.S. Treasury. So I think it’s great.”