Charles K. Stevens - General Motors Co.
Analyst · Bank of America
Hypothetical. So, clearly and first, again, I like to start these things at 10,000 feet and work my way down. We are very cognizant of that we operate in a cyclical industry, and we're eight years into expansion and it's not like we're sitting and waiting for a downturn to be prepared. I mean, day-to-day we are very focused on acting like we're in a downturn from a cost performance perspective and really taking a hard look at cost. With that said, if there was an event-driven downturn, immediate opportunity is to reduce costs, obviously, marketing. Marketing costs are a significant – I view it as significantly variable, right, depending on where the industry's at. And you could scratch out of that pretty easily something north of $1 billion. As we've talked about before, our manufacturing cost is much more variable now, and I think perhaps people still have the mental model of pre-bankruptcy where, as you took volume out, the manufacturing cost was very sticky. That's not the case now. We've got roughly 30% of our workforce that is short term that would not carry an unemployment benefit. And as we go through the next couple of years, that's going to increase to 50%. Clearly, as we see a downturn, there is a component, I hate to even bring it up, but incentive comp and profit sharing, that's a significant opportunity for reduced cost, it doesn't make any of us happy, but that's a fact. And we are continuing to look at opportunities through operational excellence, Global Business Services to drive savings in GBS. And one point related to this, we've talked about the sale of Opel/Vauxhall to PSA. We are engaged right now in an enterprise initiative to look at how this simplification of the business will allow us to take significant structure out of the business, whether it's corporate staff, whether it's engineering, because the portfolio is going to be more simplified, really across the business and we think that's going to generate significant cost savings. I would say, again stay tuned as we work through that. We will communicate it and likely it will have an upward impact on our $6.5 billion target.