General Motors’ purchase of AmeriCredit Corp. makes the automaker, 61 percent-owned by taxpayers, a better competitor, says star money manager Mario Gabelli.

GM announced Thursday that it’s buying AmeriCredit, a subprime lender, for $3.5 billion. GM wants to make more sales and leases to customers with weak credit scores.

“They need to get back in the game,” Gabelli, CEO of Gamco Investors, which manages $28 billion, told Bloomberg. “They want to go public. They want to repay the government.”

GM plans to file a prospectus in August and sell shares in November if the market is receptive, two knowledgeable sources told Bloomberg.

Gabelli says that after the stock market’s recent decline share prices are cheap. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has dropped 10 percent from its April 23 high.

As for GM, while it has struggled lately in the United States, it’s taking off in China.

GM sold 1.2 million cars and trucks there in the first half of the year, topping the 1.08 million vehicles it sold in the United States, The New York Times reports.

By 2015, the company expects to sell 3 million vehicles a year in China.

“China’s a big piece of the value of the company,” Stephen Girsky, GM’s vice chairman for corporate strategy and business development, told the Times.

“And since we pull cash out of China, it helps fund investments in other parts of the company as well.”