John Healy : Thank you. Rich, I wanted to ask a big picture question about kind of the changes in the C-suite recently. Just love to get your perspective on the move with Darren into the more of the strategy centric elements of the business. What might we expect from you guys over the next couple of years? Like what are the areas where you think that change is going to have the biggest impact on the DNA of the organization?
Richard Kramer: Well, I think the way I’d answer that, John, and the one thing I would say is we operate as a team. So I think that what makes — what I’m proud of in leading the Goodyear team is that it’s not reliant on one person. So whether Darren is in the CFO role or in a different role, helping us with strategy where Christina and Darren have worked together for so long, I think this was a really natural and elegant transition, if I can say. And I look to the leaders of our business units as well as our CTO, Chris Helsel. I think that when you look at what we’re doing, it’s the team that really is where the value is. I won’t limit it to any individual person. But I will say from a strategic perspective, I think, one, I would highlight what Christina just talked about, which is to say that we are keenly focused that we have to get our cost structure continuingly in line, not only relative to competitors who also get better.
But just the trends we see in the marketplace of. I always speak about transparency about price and availability of inventory which puts press your margin compression pressure on every business in every industry. We’re keenly aware of that, and we need to make sure that our operations continue to get more efficient every day. That means what we do in our factories on conversion cost, it means where our factories are, we’ve taken footprint actions. You can count on us to continue to take more of those and then to make the high value-added return investments that we are going to do to help drive both cost structure and more efficiency in the products we make. So that will continue. And we’re going to get — we’re going to continue to get I would say, Darren, I’ll say creative on how we make sure that we do that.
There’s a lot of manufacturing capacity in the industry. And like we did with Cooper, we need to think about how we can use that capacity more wisely as we move ahead. Secondly, I think I always tell my team, we have to have the best products in the industry. So our product innovation engine has worked. We were high podium in every product category in Europe, including summer. We have the freshest product portfolio we’ve ever had in Asia and Latin America and in the U.S., and that’s both in commercial and in consumer. We will continue to make sure that our innovation engine is working. We don’t talk about it as much, but we don’t talk about a lot of the things that are working as well as they are. So we will continue to do that. And I think what gets us most excited about this is the technological trends that are moving forward in our business.
