C E O VOI C E S
WORKING WITH TRUMPTRADE No matter how talks turn out, the White House’s policies have created deep uncertainty for CEOs over the last two years. Here’s how you’ve adapted. BY DALE BUSS
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lot of business leaders support President Donald Trump’s attempts to reform trade with China, to open markets there, to knock down barriers to American exports and, most of all, force Chinese compliance with international law for IP protection. But if you wanted to see the short-term impact of Trump’s efforts to remake the rules of global trade, January’s Detroit auto show was a pretty good place to go. It was a somber affair, especially when you consider that the U.S. auto industry has been enjoying the softest of soft landings after several years of record sales. Dependable newsmakers Sergio Marchionne, the deceased CEO of Fiat Chrysler, and Nissan-Renault chief Carlos Ghosn, languishing in a Tokyo jail, were gone. Meanwhile, reminders of how electric cars and autonomous driving are turning the industry upside down were all over the hall. But in the cavernous, hushed Cobo Center, the real cloud following CEOs was the president’s policies on trade—and a bigger sense of foreboding than they’d felt since the global financial collapse in 2008 presaged a major crash in auto sales.
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“The one thing our industry craves is clarity because of our lead times,” William Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor, said in an on-stage interview. “Right now there’s very little clarity… It makes it hard for businesses to operate. We make decisions, and they’re billion-dollar-plus decisions, and we’re doing it right now kind of flying blind. That’s not the way to do it.” German auto executives at the show worried about President Trump’s threat of a 25 percent tax on European luxury-car imports; U.S. tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports were pinching domestic CEOs; many were concerned about how a deceleration of the Chinese economy would devalue huge investments in China by Western auto companies; and the trade mess was freezing most CEOs in their tracks. Guangzhou Automobile Group of China (GAC) felt the biggest punch to the gut. After several years of showing its wares in the lobby—alongside other marginal players, including radio stations, not-for-profit groups and supplier organizations—GAC finally moved into the big time of the show floor inside Cobo. GAC staged a huge, glitzy exhibit around a concept, the Entranze EV utility vehicle, aimed at American consumers. But ironically, because
