The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (NASDAQ:GT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And of course in manufacturing we’re going to spend time on labor productivity. That’s a lot of changeovers material handling and the like. Of course purchasing SAG, non-FTE spend will all be in there as well as we look at the operations. And I guess to wrap it up to say we’ve always benchmarked really well on working capital, but that’s still an area that we’re spending some time on as well. And then I’ll just come in and second Rich’s comments on the portfolio of assets and brands. I mean, we’ll assess what’s creating long-term strategic value for our business and also what we might be able to monetize in order to redeploy capital. So more to come.

Emmanuel Rosner: Thank you so much.

Richard Kramer: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] We will move next with Rod Lache with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Rod Lache: Good morning, everybody. I guess I wanted to firstly, just ask about for a little bit more clarification on what happened during the quarter. In May one month into the quarter when you published your investor letter, you had guided to global replacement volume – consumer replacement volume being down 5% and they were down 15%. I look at markets like Europe. The market for consumer replacement not truck, consumer replacement was down 4%, you were down 26%. So there is some clear a noticeable underperformance here. So what specifically are you attributing the underperformance to, and why did it seemingly accelerate so much from into May and June.

Richard Kramer: Yes. Rod, I think maybe we’ll take a step back. First of all, you’re right. We have to own it. And we didn’t see the industry fall off as dramatically as it did and our forecast didn’t show that. We had weaker than expected conditions in truck and we had weaker overall industry environment in Europe as I spoke of before and they weren’t just small industry changes, they were significant. And I would tell you, particularly on the truck side when we look at the truck replacement market, the markets – the industry was much worse than we expected, America was down 21%, EMEA was down 15%, and that’s in some case double what we might have expected to see in the markets. Christina alluded to it before. Rod, I mean I think what happened on the truck side is, is the cycle that you’ve seen before.

We know it’s coming, it’s just very hard to predict as we came off some of the COVID situation where we had demand is running so far and ahead of supply. Finally, what we saw our lower ton miles. We saw a lower capacity utilizations in the trucking industry and as Christina mentioned, we saw significantly lower particularly in June freight rates that were out there. Those are signs that our distribution saw, it’s not their first rodeo. This is true in Europe and in the U.S. and what they did is start destocking right away. They know that it’s coming, they’ve seen it before and that’s what – that’s what they did and that’s why we saw the volume decrease in truck. I would tell you the positive side on the truck part of the business, our fleet business is holding up very well.

In fact we even one fleets at higher prices. In the quarter that business – the whole fleet service model with all the digital tools is proving to be very durable, which is what the plan was. And then secondly on the positive side as Christina mentioned, we’ll still see some destocking in Q3 probably more so in Europe than in the U.S. but that will – that will turn around as well as we go. So that’s what happened in truck and we’re dealing with it and you saw that in the forecast, we’re kind of moving forward with industry trends, making sure we’re not going to build tires that we can sell that we need to move on price. So that’s what we’re taking the consideration if the industry gets better we’ll benefit from it. And then on the Europe side, on the passenger side, excuse me.