U.S., and I'm thrilled to have the folks from General Motors here today, Paul Jacobson, CFO, and Ashish. I can't see you with these lights. He's here someplace. Paul, thank you.
Yeah.
I don't know if you want to make any opening comments or?
Well, first of all, I'll just start by saying thanks for having us. It's great to be down here and great to see a full room. I appreciate everybody coming in. We're obviously really excited about the GM story, as we've been for the last few years, and I think heading into 2026, I've shared with several people that this feels like the most stable year of the last several.
The famous last words.
But something will happen. I don't know what it is, but something will happen. And I think as a team, what we've really done over the last several years, and I think has been a great story of our resilience, is just focus on overcoming obstacles.
Yeah.
You know, it's a team that is focused on achieving our objectives, and we're doing it with more discipline and really looking forward to more of that in 2026. Six weeks into the year, you know, it's pretty consistent with what our expectations were, that we laid out. January, which, you know, is a tough month anyway, was made really tough by a week and a half of weather where-
Yeah
... basically nobody in the country was going out, at all. But overall, I think we're encouraged about the share numbers and kind of how we, how we've ended up, generally in line. It seems like the tariff environment is getting more stable, and we're getting more realization. And, you know, as we talked about $3 billion-$4 billion of tariffs this year, that's manageable for us. I mean, we, we overcame that last year, and I think as we start to get towards the end of this year and start to bring online some of that manufacturing capacity, domestic manufacturing capacity that we've added, we'll start to, you know, hopefully, see that number come down and work through that. So lots of things that are moving forward.
We've got the launch of the new trucks this year, which will obviously be a big piece as we get to the back part of the year. But it feels good. You know, we've got to work through the cash component of the special items. I know that was a big concern among investors on the call. And you know, I think we'll do that. But you know, overall, our capital allocation priorities remain the same. We're going to invest heavily into the business. We're going to maintain that strong balance sheet, and we're going to return cash back to our shareholders and really distribute that in a good, balanced, consistent way. So feel good about where the year is going.
Well, that, that formula has certainly worked the last two years. As you know, Paul, I've been following General Motors for over 40 years, and there has been a huge change in the culture of General Motors. I always like to quote one of your predecessors, and he would say: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're working on that." And they never worked on it. There is a—I call it the culture of execution.
Mm-hmm.
And I think GM is a very different company today than it was even 5 years ago, and I attribute a lot of that to Mary and to yourself, because you've changed a lot the way you look at things. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the changes that have been made in the decision-making process. Just last year and everything that took place, I don't think the old GM could have done it, and I think it really gets down to that 1 simple point, the culture of execution, making decisions, being proactive. I wonder, am I just dreaming that, or is that something that's actually taking place within General Motors?
Well, you know, I, I think when I arrived in December of 2020, I think it was a different company than many people kind of told me about it. You know, I'd, I'd had advice, "You don't want to go into the auto business, it's slow," and so on. But when I got there, I saw a team that was moving really, really fast. And I think, you know, COVID taught a lot of companies a lot of things. I think it taught GM a lot about itself, and the ability to be able to move quickly, to be able to react, and to be able to survive that level of adversity is a pretty strong statement.
You know, what Mary's done is built an incredible leadership team from people inside the company and people outside the company, bringing the best of that GM culture, tradition, brand, cachet, all of it, and design, with different ways of thinking. Different ways of thinking about finance, different things, ways of thinking about technology and software, and so on. And I think it's that group that has really gelled together across the company. I think COVID and the chip crisis and, you know, everything that's happened since then has given us a lot of confidence in ourselves, to be able to think, to be able to be nimble, et cetera. And what we've tried to do is take all that and set the organization up to be dynamic.
We're carrying 30%-40% less inventory than we used to carry. That allows us to move faster, be able to respond to consumer needs faster, be able to respond to the market faster. We're focused on cash flow and margin, not just market share and volume, and that's a huge driver in terms of what you've seen, in terms of our ability to drive free cash flow from where we've been 10 years ago to where we are today. To be able to do that consistently through this adversity, I think, is a huge badge of honor. All that credit really goes to Mary, her leadership, and everybody working together.
Yeah, she's got an incredible ability to have the executives put their egos aside and work for the better of the corporation-
Yeah
... from what I've seen.
Well, it's 100% about the enterprise, and it's about making sure, you know, everybody thinks about, and what we talk a lot about is, you know, share buybacks and so on, and even people in the company. But what it's really about is cash generation to be able to fund the future. And, and that's what we've got. You've got the, you know, probably, arguably, I haven't been there long enough to say this, but arguably the best portfolio we've ever had. We're adjusting through the massive regulatory swings that we've seen over the last 3-4 years. But trying to find that way through the middle to be able to, to meet customers where they are.
That includes ICE, it includes some EVs as well, and we've got to focus our efforts on continuing to drive EVs towards profitability while harnessing that ICE portfolio.
You touched on inventory, and, you know, in your presentation, I guess it was last September, over in the U.K.-
Mm-hmm.
You had a couple really interesting charts, and you were talking about how lower inventory affects the entire organization, but most importantly, cash flow. How does it affect cash flow, and what types of capital have you been able to free up?
Well, I mean, I think you've, first of all, you've got to look at getting full value for the products. You know, I think a lot of, a lot of the history of the auto industry has been focused, not unlike my prior industry, which was focused on marginal cost economics, right?
Mm.
The next vehicle you can produce has a really low marginal cost if you can just run it through the factory, therefore produce it and discount it, sell it. The challenge is that starts to erode all the brands. When you've got premium brands that you're heavily discounting to drive that extra unit of sales, then, you know, you lose that brand value. So when you look at what we've been able to do with taking a more disciplined approach to inventory, so we're not just trying to push volume and focus on the brands, you see an industry dynamic where we're discounting roughly 200 basis points less than the industry average.
Yeah.
That's been true while others have, you know, gone in and announced sales to try to drive share, or they've been on the wrong side of an inventory curve. That's a very different way of thinking, but it's one that if you look at all the really powerful brands, not just in autos, but across the world, they recognize where that brand value is. I think what that's done is, you know, probably driven about $3 billion-$4 billion of just straight better cash performance to the bottom line of the company, by recognizing that value and not just trying to push more vehicles out the door.
So that discipline really does go through, through it, and I think, I think we've got really good stewards of the brands, where we are, and, and, and great dealers that are, that are helping to accomplish that as well.
the dealers have bought into it?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, has it changed the from order to delivery time? Has that come down, and is there more to go? Can you free up more capital by getting more increased efficiencies?
Well, you know, I think, you know, interestingly, we saw this during COVID, and especially during the chip crisis, that, you know, customer satisfaction went up despite the fact that they might have had to wait a couple more days or a week-
Mm
... to get their vehicle. And the reason is, you know, historically you'd walk into a dealership, and you'd look at the vehicles that are on the lot, and they might have 85%-90% of what you want, but, you know, at the end of the day, that's the inventory you built from, and if you wanted to drive away, you took one of those. Now, what people have realized, and the chip crisis did this, is if I just wait a really short period of time, I can get exactly what I want. So we've seen customer satisfaction go up over that time period as well. So, you know, I think it's a strong indication that this is sustainable in a way that historically it wasn't.
Maybe we don't have an 18+ million unit SAAR, but I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.
Sure.
You know, if we try to take out the peak and that, the benefit of that is that the trough is much, much shallower than it used to be. That's a win for us and I think a win for the industry.
Yeah. If the autos become less cyclical, that would be really good.
Yeah. And what we have to do is we have to focus on, we'll never take cyclicality out of the business, right?
Right, right.
That's fine. But what we can do is we can eliminate self-induced cyclicality.
Yes.
When you go into a down cycle, and you're sitting on 100, 120 days of inventory, you are chasing the falling knife, right?
Yes.
Meaning that, you know, what you're trying to do is you're trying to stimulate more demand while you slow down production against this wall of months of inventory that you've got to work through, and you're cranking even more vehicles into that slowing demand. It becomes self-fulfilling, and that's what causes the trough to deepen.
No question. Yeah, it, you know, while we're on, because the trucks are so important to General Motors, in years past, what GM would do is they'd build up inventory heading into a truck change, and then they'd shut all the plants down at the same time. And of course, they'd have to discount the trucks because everybody's waiting for the new ones. It looks like some of that is coming into this truck change coming up, because it's crucial for General Motors. It's a big number, and it looks like you've already started doing some of the work at the plants. Inventory's down. Does that put you in a better position to kind of weather this next 6-9 months, keeping it a little more stable with the trucks? And is that a conscious effort?
Yeah, I think, I think everything's going to be more stable when you're, when you're operating from a base of less inventory-
Yeah, yeah
... from that standpoint. So we are, you know, retooling and focusing on bringing those next generation trucks to the market. You know, I think one of the things that we've talked about that many investors are looking towards and asking about is: Are we going to see a big spike in price? And I think if you look at the historical models and the heuristics, that usually was driven by the fact that pricing by the end of a cycle had dropped off and tailed off pretty significantly. We've seen pricing on all of the vehicles hold up much, much longer. So you know, I don't, I don't think it's a big spike. I don't think that there's, like, massive price increases coming.
I think it's just a matter of kind of working through that and, and transitioning to the new vehicle. But we've got really strong demand for our trucks, and we're looking forward to that new one coming out, too.
Yeah, it's one of the topics, onshoring. What are some of the puts and takes? When I think about it, you know, one of the risks is you put investment into the U.S., a new administration comes in, and they say, "Ah, let's go back to the old way. Let's open up," whatever it is. What are your thoughts on onshoring and some of the puts and takes, and, you know, where does GM stand on that now?
Well, I mean, I think, you know, the obvious ones are, you know, you're trading off tariff expense for higher labor costs, for sure. That's not a terrible thing if at the end of the day, you've got a policy that is rewarding that level of investment.
Is labor cost differential, like Mexico, U.S. is $1,000 a vehicle, is that about ballpark?
It's in that general area, right, when you think about that. Maybe a little bit more. But at the end of the day, when you're putting a tariff on top of it, it's not. So we've got to create balance, and I think, you know, when you look at USMCA, you look at Canada and Mexico, hopefully, everybody can find alignment on the right thing to do, because as a trading block, I think that's really important from that standpoint. But you know, at the same time, bringing production into the U.S. is also addressing one of those things that we've really seen over the last five years, which is, you know, geopolitical and global risk, right?
Whether it was the pandemic affecting different parts of the world at different times, we need to have a little bit more diversity and a little bit more, bringing things closer to home, to help have some more control of that. So I think overall, it's going to be more stable for production. We also... We'll get a little bit of incremental production out of it that, that'll give us levers to be able to respond if we need to. So, for example, you know, we know at Arlington, the full-size SUVs and the Escalades, we, we run all out, right? We've got a little bit of additional supply that we can-
You make some money on those.
And we're doing okay in that space. So, you know, make sure that we strike that balance, but we can sell every SUV we make out of Arlington, so that capacity will be a nice relief valve for us.
One of the other big cultural changes I've seen, not just GM in the industry, in total, is, 20 years ago, if you were to survey suppliers, they hated GM, they hated Ford. You've had a much tighter relationship with the supply base, and I think the latest example is the BEVs, and you touched on some of the reimbursements, cash reimbursements. In the past, that wouldn't have taken place. What kind of positive feedback or I doubt negative from the supply base? What are you hearing from them as it relates to this?
Well, you know, I think our team, led by Shilpan Amin and Jeff Morrison team, do really an outstanding job with our suppliers. And if you look at the volatility we've seen, whether it was chips or Nexperia or all that, we've tended to work through that in a much-
Yeah
... more consistent way. And I think that's, you know, in part driven by focusing on that partnership and trying to find solutions that are mutually beneficial. I mean, we want the value chain to be the most valuable value chain, and those relationships are very, very important. So, you know, making sure that, you know, we try to find that balance between the uncertainty and the planning that's required to be able to do what we do. So, you know, there are many areas where, you know, suppliers have done things based on our projections that just haven't come true. We need to figure out what's the right balance in order to cover that.
We, you know, that was a big reason why we did the charge the way we did, was to try to get it done quickly, because we want a supply chain that's focused on tomorrow-
Right
... isn't focused on, "You need to make me whole for last year.
Right.
So, I think it's a little bit of a different approach, and you know, we've still got a lot of work to do to kind of work our way through that. But the team has made really, really good progress since the end of the year. And our objective is to get this behind us as quickly as possible, because we understand the uncertainty that, and the overhang that that creates. We just want to work our way through it, focus on execution, as you led off the conversation, and move on and start worrying about tomorrow.
You know, some in the media think you're getting out of EVs. That's not the case at all.
No.
It's, you still have a lot of product coming in that front.
Yeah.
So where do you think EVs go from here? I kind of look at California and say California's at 20%. That's probably a good guidepost of where we're heading as a, as an industry. Whether it takes 3 years, 5 years, or 10, it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
Is that the way you think about it?
Well, I mean, I think a couple of things. Obviously, the $7,500 consumer tax credit-
Yes
... was like a reset button-
That's right
... on demand. But I think getting to a more natural demand state is actually healthier for the products and for the consumers as well.
Mm-hmm.
We saw a lot of really irrational behavior last year, 60, 70, 80% incentives on vehicles. That's not a business model that is built for sustainment. That is a business model that's built to acquire regulatory credits. So you had this mismatch between the carrot and the stick, the stick being the regulatory penalties and the carrot being, let's give some consumer benefits. I think what you've got now is a more consistent policy, and there will be people that will agree with it and won't agree with it. But what it does do is it actually creates that natural demand. So EV demand wasn't zero before the IRA.
No, that's right.
Right? And it won't be zero after. We're trending around that 5%-7%, which is kind of what we saw going into IRA. We do believe that EVs are gonna continue to grow, and they're gonna win just because of the technology, the capabilities of the vehicle, as well as the charging infrastructure expanding and so on, and just what we see from customers who buy an, buy an EV. You know, about 80% of them say they want to buy an EV again for their next vehicle. So our job is to continue to say, in a more rational, disciplined environment, can we put products out there that are competitive and profitable? And that's, that's what we're working on. So we're still investing, but we're not investing in product proliferation. We're investing in making the vehicles better performing at a lower cost-
You're more focused-
Which we do with LFP technology.
On the manufacturing side.
Exactly.
Where they're produced.
Exactly.
Are all the regulatory issues resolved on all the different, you know, the reason why people are chasing the credits? Has all that been resolved through Congress yet, or are we still waiting on any piece?
We saw CAFE get zeroed out.
Right
Last year, which, you know, we took a charge for that. The EPA just ruled, you know, overturned the Endangerment Finding , we know that. We expect that there's gonna be more work to do beyond that, whether it's going through potential litigation or going through the regulatory framework of saying, "Okay, now what does that mean?" But, you know, I think the administration's been pretty clear about trying to deregulate the industry. Now, we still have the federal versus the states.
Right.
So we're doing our best to try to navigate that, and that's another reason not to really abandon EVs, because we might see that change again. So let's spend some time, let's spend some capital investing in making that sustainable for the long run, rather than completely, you know, swinging the pendulum too far in either direction. And that's where that balance is.
That's important. But it, for this year at least, it's a positive when you look at incremental year-over-year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a positive in that we're bringing down our losses.
Right.
But last year, as we said, was a really challenging year because it was constant resetting of the demand curve, and that constant resetting is what creates a whole bunch of frictional costs that accrued to us last year. So we know we can do better this year.
It's kind of gone under the radar, but the numbers are starting to get meaningful on the software and services side, and what is GM doing with that, and how big can it get? I know you have aspirational goals. How big can it get, and what does that mean as you look at the organization from an earnings/cash flow standpoint?
Yeah. So I mean, we talked about this, and, you know, I still hear about this a lot, you know, but we talked about this at the 2021 Investor Day-
Yeah
... and nobody really believed it. Yeah, so there was a lot of commentary about where Cruise could go. Cruise, you know, we folded it back in. We're focusing on the retail and the consumer applications rather than robotaxi. But we had embedded in there a lot of different software revenues coming in and, you know, we're probably a little bit behind on that, but we are certainly making the progress that we said we could. And you look at the level of deferred revenue that we've got on the books, you look at the deepening of the customer relationships, whether it's through OnStar or it's through GM Rewards and the new card platform, we're getting those attachment points to the retail customer, and that's the basis for growth.
I mean, ultimately, we need to get to a point in the business where we can drive just as much profitability, if not more, over the long run from the car park, versus just-
Yeah
-producing and wholesaling vehicles. I think that's the seismic shift in what digital can do, whether it's in an EV or an ICE vehicle going forward. You know, we still believe in that. We still believe that that's the future. You know, we'll start to see that rolling out when we get Software-Defined Vehicle 2.0 in place, which we talked about at the GM Tech Forward event last year. And the team is doing a great job of hitting those objectives. Now, what do we do with it, right? We've got to go figure out the commercial applications and the ways to drive value to the consumer. But there is a huge untapped potential that, you know, when you look at a 7x multiple-
Yeah
... it's not built into the valuation. So that all feeds in. I know this is a long answer, sorry, but it all feeds into what we've been doing with the stock in terms of buying it back. I mean, despite the run-up that we've seen, we still see tremendous value in the stock based on how much cash we're generating and what we think our forward growth trajectory can be.
Well, yeah, in the cable industry, they used to say that the cable has the pipeline to the house, and, you know, look what it's done-
Sure
... between the TV, the content, the telephone, the internet, and everything else. The autos are a platform of communication, and is OnStar the pipeline? Is that the key to getting inside the vehicle, software-defined vehicle? Does OnStar, GM's got a huge leadership globally in that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, and when you think about the legacy and the history of OnStar, combining it with the new technologies-
Yeah
... and where AI can take it, and then you talk about the relationships that we have through GM Financial. There's really deep ties to the consumer base there, that, that I think gives us that avenue. The technology will look really different in the future. We know that.
Yeah.
It's already starting to take shape. But yeah, it's that foundational relationship that we need to, you know, continue to invest in.
Is there a place that we can find the deferred revenue, or just wait for your Q? Is it published in Qs or Ks or anywhere?
Yeah, you can see it in our financials, but also we're now talking about it-
You talk about it more.
... more.
Yeah.
Mainly because it's reached a scale where I think it's meaningful. Honestly, if we had talked about this three or four years ago, I'm not sure anybody would've paid attention to it. What we really wanted to do is just kind of go in and focus on fixing it and driving that type of revenue and then kind of reveal it out. Now you see the type of growth that we're seeing-
Yeah
... in that deferred revenue and what the margins are doing. You know, when you bring that, that level of revenue recognition that you're building at software company-like margins, it's not gonna take long for that to add up and to have a real meaningful impact on the overall margins of the enterprise.
That's certainly what it sounds like. You mentioned AI. And I know that's a widely used phrase, but I kind of look at the auto's an incredibly capital-intensive industry, and inventory alone, if you look in the U.S., you got about $150 billion of capital tied up in inventory. How low can it go? I mean, you're proof that it can go lower. Toyota, for years, has been way low.
Yeah.
You know, is that where your target is, to get inventory down? Well, you have a truck, so that kind of distorts it a little bit, but you have more room to go. Can AI help you make that process more efficient? Can more computer technology in that regard shorten that lifeline from the order to delivery to paying suppliers?
Well, I mean, I think the short answer is AI can help everywhere in the company. I mean, all the way from, you know, consumer-facing to how do we use AI to improve the experience for the customer in the vehicle with what it can do, all the way back to the finance function, HR, manufacturing, assembly, everything. And that's where we see great potential. So we're doing a bunch of investing right now in our finance architecture to get to much more real-time data and being able to really focus on, you know, what we see. You know, I think we do a good job of that today, but we do it with brute force, right?
And we've got to go find and drive that efficiency to be able to do it faster and glean insights. On the manufacturing side, absolutely, you know, whether it's process, this is really complex, and having the ability of copilots, if you will, really helping you along and helping you to troubleshoot, find opportunities, that's gonna make it more efficient. Whether that's inventory, whether it's manufacturing process, whether it's time, speed, quality, we think there's huge untapped potential here.
Well, less cyclical and less capital intensive would be a big deal for autos, and I think ultimately helps-
And throw higher margins in-
Yeah.
You've actually got a really good consistent-
You might actually sell it seven times earnings.
Yeah. Maybe 17, 20, 70. You know, we'll see.
GM's done a great job. I think you gained share in the U.S. four straight years.
Mm-hmm.
When I look back over the last 20 or 30 years, GM spent a lot of time making products that no one really wanted, mid-sized cars, that they were turning to the Japanese brands. When I look out over the next 10 years, you know, I think one of the things the entire investment world is ignoring is the impact of the millennials and Gen Z on our overall economy. In the auto industry in particular, the impact will be greater than the baby boomers in the 1980s. One thing I know about the millennials and Gen Z is they're early adopters of technology.
Mm-hmm.
How does GM position itself to capture them? I mean, they love your trucks. Will they adapt to this technology? Are they gonna buy into it 100%?
Well, I mean, I think, I think it's more than just the trucks. I think you have to look at that whole portfolio, and it, and it starts with the vehicle portfolio. We have, I think, the, the broadest array, all the way up from the Cadillac Escalade down to the Chevy Trax, right, at a, you know, just around $20,000 price tag. We sold 700,000 vehicles last year, under $30,000.
Wow.
Historically, that would have been big money losers, big loss leaders in the company. We're making money on all those vehicles, and that's a huge testament to what the engineering, design and manufacturing teams have been able to do. And I think one of the most unheralded aspects of what we've been doing in that success. The reason that's important is you need to build that loyalty up from the ground up. So you know, there aren't a lot of Gen Zs or millennials that are buying, you know, Cadillac Escalades or GMC Denali Yukons, but they're gonna work their way up there, right?
Yeah.
If you can surprise and delight them with technology as they're working their way up, the pricing curves and value curves as their income goes up and so on, their families get bigger, that's a huge, huge leg up. Because many of our competitors kind of abandoned that sector, thinking they could never make money doing it. We've seen great growth there.
Are your foreign partners key to that, Japan, Korea, or is that where you have the most effective?
So, yeah. So, you know, we manufacture some of those vehicles in Korea and, you know, there's a real cost advantage and one that we've been balanced, even with the tariff, to pay there, to make sure that we can still do that, and we still feel it's the right thing to do. At the same time, we're onshoring more of this capacity, as we've announced with the $5 billion of investments, both in the next Gen V8 technology, but also in vehicle assembly. So you know, overall, it's part of that balanced approach to be able to deliver the product set to all customers at all points.
Yep. Do you want to take some questions?
Sure.
Anybody have any questions?
Thanks for taking my question. Just curious on the EV, you know, penetration and growth. How far is GM in terms of cost parity with ICE vehicles today? I know we thought a few years ago we were gonna be there already by now, and clearly, the cost equation will impact the demand side. So you know, whether it's a percentage or in years. And then secondly, kind of which of the components is it, batteries, really that's kind of preventing you from getting there, you know, relative to Tesla and other kind of pure-play EV providers? I'm really intrigued by, you know, the demand side of the equation, but if cost comes down, presumably you'll be incentivized to promote EVs even more if it's more profitable.
Yeah. So I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Certainly, the cost of the battery and the cost of the vehicles is higher, right? And we're working on technology to do that. When you look at the work that Kurt Kelty and the team have done with LMR and getting to the switching to the prismatic, it's gonna save us a lot of money at the pack level, $1,000s per vehicle, that will help us for that next generation of electric vehicles. I think it's been commercial, too. It's been really difficult to go in and establish some level of consistency in pricing. We've done that. I think our pricing has been more consistent.
Our incentives, as we talked about, being 200 basis points below the average, it's far greater than that on the EV side because we haven't wanted to get into that, let's, let's, you know, crater the brands, for regulatory purposes. But that backdrop, when, you know, people are offering $99 leases and so on, it's, it's really difficult to try to grab that foothold, and I think that's where more rationality is gonna help.... Then the last piece of it is scale, right? We, we were scaled to produce 1 million vehicles a year because that's what the regulatory environment was setting up to require us to do. That's the, that was the, the bulk of the write-off, was going in and saying: Okay, we know that the, the demand curve is going to be much flatter.
It's still going to grow, but it's not going to be growing to 50% by 2030, which is what the regulatory environment required. So we were never going to make a lot of progress against that backdrop of carrying twice as much, three times as much, four times as much overhead as we needed. And so, while I don't love to write off capital, it was the right decision to be able to do that because the game has changed, right? And so what we've got is now there's still a big gap between ICE and EV, but we've got the pathway to you know start to take costs out in the thousands of dollars. We need scale, right? We're going to have to have that in every vehicle that we do and do consistently.
That's going to take a little bit of time, but what we, I think, what we've done is really aggressively gone in and stopped the bleeding, because like I said, last year got worse, not better, in terms of profitability because of that choppiness of the demand forecasting. So that was, "Let's hit the reset button. Let's focus on where we are going forward." And I think that consistent framework is going to give us a path to be able to do it. It's going to take some time, though, especially if we see it kind of hovering around 5, 7, 10% type penetration. It's going to take some time to get there.
Any questions? Harald?
Thanks, Mike, and thanks for taking my question. I'm the European auto analyst at Citi. Just the resilience conversation I thought was really interesting, right? Because the auto industry, you know, both the geopolitics, tariffs, supply chains, DRAM, the amount of change we've seen over the last three, four, five years has been unlike any change we've seen previously. How much progress do you think you've made? How much more resilient is your business now, and what other risks do you think there might be out there that, you know, you might lie awake at night about, where there are still, you know, vulnerabilities that maybe we didn't or we didn't sufficiently think about previously, right? That's really where I think a lot of this is coming from.
Yeah. Years ago, I remember being in the boardroom, in my, in my prior life, and there was a, you know, a big disruption that happened and, you know, a board member asked me one of the best questions I've ever heard in the boardroom, which is: Tell me what you're doing to prepare for the next time this happens, understanding that next time is going to look completely different than this time. And, you know, it took me a while to understand that, but that's really been what the last few years have been. And, you know, I kind of said, tongue in cheek: The year's starting off stable. I don't know what will happen, but something is probably going to happen. Let's be ready for it.
I think, you know, you look at the reactions of many of the OEMs after the election. We saw a lot of people, you know, running around not knowing what to do, talked about chaos and so on. We went to work. We had a playbook because we really sort of learned from COVID and the chip shortage. Let's just figure out what the situation is giving us, how do we work our way through it? So we had that tariff playbook done before Inauguration Day. We knew what we were going to do. We didn't know every single decision, but we knew what was going to guide it.
We knew there were easy, no-regret decisions, like we made to increase the throughput at Fort Wayne to take out some of our manufacturing and fixed costs, to start thinking about go-to-market and so on. We were on top of that, really, even before the tariffs were announced, because it was something that the president campaigned on, right? So you can act surprised, or you can just go to work, roll up your sleeves, and figure out how to get through there. And I think that's some of the lessons that we've taken through COVID, chip shortage, et cetera, that we apply every day. Like I said, it's easier to do when you have less inventory in the system because you can just respond much more quickly. So I'm incredibly proud of what the team has done.
I've got confidence, and, you know, I said at an internal meeting that we had that, you know, we've got the market focused on the most important risk there is, which is execution risk. I want the market betting on the management team and the people of General Motors, and the way you do that is you prove you can execute through that, and we're starting to see that. You know, it's creating that momentum effect that is really, really important for an organization and for an enterprise to see. You know, we've got to make sure that we can keep that up.
Questions out there? The execution is the biggest change I've seen at GM over the last 40 years.
Yeah. All credit goes to Mary and Mark and the team.
Yeah. Yeah, Mark, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark, he's an execution guy.
Yeah.
Um-
He's created a pretty amazing portfolio.
Yes, he has. We'd be remiss if we didn't touch on share repo, your strategy and what you're thinking about, where it goes from here. You've been very successful at buying your stock at extremely low prices. I'm guessing the average price is somewhere around $40?
A little, little higher than that, but yeah, we, we bought a lot back when it was in the thirties.
Yeah, including personally.
Including-
Yes, you did. Yeah, track his insider buying, you'll get a pretty good tip on GM.
That's too much pressure, and I'm not, I'm not allowed to make investment recommendations.
Yeah, that's true.
No, you know, look, I think, you know, at the end of the day, our shareholders have been really patient with us for a long time, and it's good to get this balanced approach. This capital allocation policy isn't something new. I think we're probably focusing more on it these days, and creating that discipline of, and that constraining the level of investment. You know, I think, you know, we interestingly no longer get asked about when CapEx is going to go back to the $8 billion level, and hopefully, we've sort of successfully swatted that away. Because number one, $8 billion then isn't $8 billion today. It's closer to $11 billion today. We've been remarkably good stewards of that capital. We could invest a lot more.
We can afford to invest more, but we're focused also on long-term margin performance, and I don't, we don't want to have to hire more engineers, more supply chain, more, acquire more facilities and more space that's going to drive up our fixed costs to be able to deploy more capital efficiently. So that's where the balance comes in, and I think it's done really well. The board is still very enthusiastic. While we've seen a little bit of movement in the multiple, I think that's been an industry lift more than it's been GM. You still see us discounted against peers that don't perform as consistently, as we do. And as a result of that, I continue to believe that the rational market is gonna puncture through that.
In the meantime, we're just gonna keep buying shares back from that standpoint.
Always-
They're undervalued.
Yeah, they are. Any questions?
Recognizing that if you ever had a CFO up here saying their stock was overvalued, it probably might be the end. But I really believe it.
Anything else? All right. If not, Paul, thank you.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it. Always appreciate-
Thank you, all.