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

John Healy: Great. And then just a question or two on the OE business, just any sort of preliminary thoughts about kind of model year ’24 is that you’re coming out and how you’re positioned and maybe how you’re positioned relative to previous years? And just on – as well as on what the potential uncertainty on kind of labor for the manufacturers, any sort of guardrails or thought process to how you’re approaching kind of the fall timeframe? Thank you.

Richard Kramer: Yes, so on the OE side, I will tell you and Christina sort of alluded to this. Obviously we missed in the quarter and that was a lot of European replacement volume and truck volume across our regions. A bright spot was the OE business in both the U.S. and in Europe and I think that’s still a, is still a factor of all the work that we’ve done on working with the OEMs to make sure that we’re on the new models coming forward and remember we’ve talked about a win rate that’s like in the 60% range, highly weighted towards the EVs and at higher margins. And I think that trend is continuing for us, very positive. And also I would – I would tell you that our work with the OEMs has really shown a lot of promise. I think now we’ve done and just a quarter I think three fitments that have been a virtual submissions where we actually haven’t even had to build tires, where we dealt sort of digital submissions and then built only one tire for them to move forward with.

And we did that our new fitments and we did that actually taking fitments away from some competitors. So I would say really confident that what we’ve done in OE continues to move in a very positive way.

John Healy: Thank you.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question Emmanuel Rosner with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Emmanuel Rosner: Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. So Christina in previous quarters you indulge me and essentially provided your latest thoughts on the full year free cash flow scenario for the company and I was wondering if you’d be so kind to update us in the context of obviously the pressures you’ve seen in the second quarter. Some of them continuing in the third, especially on the mix front and what would that do for your full year free cash flow?

Christina Zamarro: Yes, Emmanuel and thanks for question. I have to say free cash flow certainly remains a top priority for us and as we think about what our business should be able to generate in normalized environments and also as we think about our leverage go forward. As we look at ’23 right now until we continue to expect some positive free cash flow this year albeit less now than before. So slightly positive free cash flow and we set out all of the drivers for you that should help frame that up. With a smaller contribution coming from free cash flow that maybe what we had expected when we last spoke, we are focused on additional actions in the near term to generate some cash, including the sale leaseback program, so we included in the investor letter an expectation for cash proceeds of, call it 150 million to 200 million this year from those transactions.

But I do think it’s important to say that we understand that our business is one that should generate free cash flow and we’ll continue to keep our focus on that as earnings improve in the near term and we really get to see the underlying earnings power of our business and all of that thought process will go into our next year’s planning.