Charles K. Stevens - General Motors Co.
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Yeah, sure. Let me start kind of at 10,000 feet and work my way down a little bit. I already spoke to our inventory level, and we feel our inventory level is appropriate given our dealer footprint, and what's really driven the increase in inventory which is filling out inventory on newly launched products and new entries that we didn't have before like the CT6 or the Envision as an example. And continuing to work on inventory for our compact crossover so that we have sufficient supply as we look to change those models over in 2017. From a pricing incentive perspective, clearly the market in general is getting more competitive and there is some aggressiveness from a truck perspective, but I step back and look at the overall strength of our three-truck strategy, the light duty, heavy duty and mid-size trucks, we've been able to maintain discipline around that, grow retail share and increase our transaction prices in spite of some of this, and I think, it's fundamentally driven by the very, very strong product, relative to the truck capacity coming on stream. We could sell more vehicles, if we have more vehicles from a truck perspective today, and hence one of the clear focus areas on the retail side of the business. You also need to peel the onion a bit on where are we – where is the industry actually adding capacity, is it in trucks, is it in SUVs, is it in crossovers, because again we believe we're well-positioned. We have dominant share in full-size SUVs and our full-size pickup trucks continue to perform very well. To your last point or how do we continue to see earnings be sustained from a North American standpoint, and I think, there's two or three fundamental drivers to that, Rod. Number one, we're running at different play and it's generating different results. We're very focused on retail in a very disciplined way. Our retail market share is up, we're less reliant on less profitable daily rental, and that's showing up in our results. We also have our very, very strong product launch cadence, so this year we fundamentally rolled over our entire passenger car portfolio, and next year we'll start the strong launch cadence of completely refreshing crossovers, small, compact and mid-size over the next 12 months to 18 months; and that's critical, that's a lot of volume, it's highly profitable and we expect to see that. We also expect to see continued improvements from a cost standpoint. North America fundamentally enjoys the large benefit of that $5.5 billion of cost efficiency, and as Mary indicated, we're looking to drive that even higher and that's going to be fundamentally from a material performance, logistics performance and we'll continue to streamline manufacturing and SG&A. Taking all that together, we're confident and constructive that under a plateaued industry environment that we can continue to sustain strong margins in North America like we have done over the past couple of years.