General Motors Corp.'s top sales executives said the automotive industry appears to be in the early stages of emerging from the global downturn that helped push both the company and Chrysler LLC into bankruptcy.

"We are starting to see both globally and in the United States that the industry is starting to turn for the positive," said Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis. "We think that we are starting to emerge from this global downturn."

GM, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, said May sales fell 29.6% compared with the same period a year earlier. However, sales increased 11% when compared to April.

Ford Motor Co. (F) saw its sales increase 20% compared to April while Chrysler LLC had an 8% increase. Chrysler LLC filed for bankruptcy April 30. The company is in the process of merging its assets with Fiat SpA.

Automakers have been waiting for sales to bottom since tight credit markets, combined with a collapse in home prices, have pushed car sales to historic lows over the past several months.

GM and Ford executives expect the annualized selling rate in May to finish at the 10 million mark, a jump from the 9.3 million rate for the month of April. The selling rate was 14.3 million new cars and trucks in May 2008.

DiGiovanni cautioned that the industry must continue to keep an eye on rising oil prices.

"Gas prices increased from $2.10 to $2.32 a gallon in April to May," DiGiovanni said. "They are still down a lot from last year but these are the highest gas prices we have seen since October 2008."

Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president of North America sales, said the worst, in terms of the bankruptcy news, appears to be behind the company and will have a negligible impact on the company in the future.

GM, like Chrysler, is also planning to trim dealers, but at a slower rate. The company notified about 1,000 dealers that they could be cut from the network. Those dealers will be closed through the end of the year.

Chrysler told 789 dealers last month that they will have to close and leave the network by June 9. The dealers are responsible for getting rid of inventory that has caused some dealers to slash prices.

"We will not have fire sales," LaNeve said. "We will also offer our dealers modest financial help as we wind them down."

LaNeve declined to comment on a report by The Wall Street Journal that GM will sell its Hummer brand to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co., a little-known Chinese company.

-By Jeff Bennett, Dow Jones Newswires; jeff.bennett@dowjones.com; 248-204-5542