Paul Jacobson

Well, Jonathan, first of all, thank you very much for having us.

It's a great day to be at GM and celebrate the success of all of our employees and partners worldwide.

So really appreciate you being here today, having me today.

So, you know, at the end of the day, it's just another change.

I mean, since coming to GM in 2020, we've gone through COVID, we've gone through chip shortage, we've gone through tariffs.

We've gone through EV pivots and so on.

But what we've really tried to do is create a model that is resilient.

And when you look at our balance sheet, you look at our inventory discipline and the way we've gone to market, there's a lot of things that have changed that allow us to be able to react to the world around us faster.

And I think that's paved the way for us to have another really strong year in the face of a lot of macro changes.

Well, you know, I think what we've really done well as a team, I think, is we've kept focus on that long-term vision.

So, you know, for example, while we've taken a charge on reducing some of our EV capacity, reflecting the demand that's out there, we still believe that EVs are the future.

And we think that there's an opportunity for us to take a little bit of a pause in demand growth that we've seen over the last few years, structurally improve it, right-size our capacity, and make sure that we can be successful as more and more customers adopt it.

So it's just an example of how we make sure that we're managing the short-term within the face of that longer-term vision.

Well, I think we learned a lot in industry from COVID and a focused supply chain that was really susceptible to individualized shocks.

And I think we've taken the effort to try to make sure that we diversify our supply chain base.

We've made a number of investments, for example, in battery raw materials and other materials in the US, in addition to the $4 billion that we've announced this year to increase our US manufacturing capacity.

So I think it's been a case of making sure that that's balanced.

And then when we went through the chip crisis of 2021, there were some more challenges about making sure that we expand the places where some of our chips are fabricated and our supply base that we use.

So this has just been part of it.

I think we've learned a lot of lessons over the last five years that have helped us and positioned us well to be able to thrive in ever-changing circumstances like we see right now.