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

Emmanuel Rosner: I appreciate it. My second question is on the – some of the reiterated comments in your letter – shareholder letter around approaching or closing in on the 8% SOI margin in the back half of the year. It seems like based on the factors of outlook you’re sharing with us for the third quarter, that’s certainly not going to be the case in this quarter. I’m not sure if it is – if I guess you’re thinking is, you could get there in the fours or that you just saying directionally to some sequential improvement and over time we could get there. I just – I didn’t see is the change in language even though it seems like the outlook at the very least, for the third quarter is quite a bit weaker than you would have soft probably last time. So can you maybe share your thoughts on that path towards 8% and timing.

Christina Zamarro: Yes, sure Emmanuel. The way I think about the change from when we last talked I think our second half outlook right now would take a more run rate scenario for EMEA’s earnings into consideration in the back half of the year. Where we were at the end of the first quarter was a position where we thought that EMEA would have by mid-year gotten to historical run rate earnings and just given the weakness in the industry over the past quarter, we have really downgraded that expectation. So certainly a big improvement sequentially margin into Q3 and then again into Q4 and EMEA still remains subject to a great deal of volatility, but what I would say is, we still see a very strong recovery in Americas and in Asia Pacific and this means a realistic scenario where both of these businesses are going to be at or above the 8% target in Q4.

And so, I mean I think it’s relative to the first half margins and also really strong improvements in at least a couple of our businesses.

Richard Kramer: Yes Christina. Listen I’ll jump in, I was going to reiterate the points as well. When we look at the exit rates for the Americas and Asia we still feel pretty good about where those businesses are heading and again the destocking point, I think our inventory in the U.S. was down, I think it was 11% in Q1 and 14% in Q2 in terms of channel inventories. That bodes well add to that in the U.S. VMT is up and add to that the economy is actually probably stronger than we thought it would be. So we feel – we still feel pretty good about where we’re going to be in the U.S. and Asia as well. I think the numbers there speak for themselves. Europe continues to be the area that we need to focus on. We got hit much harder on truck and passenger on a declining industry.

I mean it was, it was worse than our expectations for sure. The industry was down about, consumer was down about 13% in Q1 was down another 12 in Q2 and sell-out was down about 4% in Q2 as well. I think that’s indicative of the economic sort of malaise that we’re seeing over there. Having said that, it doesn’t do any good to talk about it, we need to get volume back in Europe to get that business back to the $50 million run rate that we’re talking about per quarter. And we need to make sure that we’re aggressive on our cost structure over there both from an SAG perspective, from a footprint perspective from everything we do over there and last quarter we alluded to some of the actions that we were in process of taking. Those are in play, those are things we’re doing.

One, you saw the action that we took in our planned folder already and you’ll see more of that coming in fact some of this will move into some of the special committee work that we’re focused on following the settlement agreement that we had with Elliott. And Europe is front and center on that. We just can’t live with the cost structure and the results we have over there.