Florent Menegaux
CEO, Managing General Partner & Managing Chairman
Good afternoon and good evening. As a CEO, I wanted to introduce this conference and stand in front of you at this challenging moment for Michelin.
On Monday last week, we issued a profit warning. It came late in the year and with unexpected magnitude. I fully recognize it. I owe you clarity to help you understand what led us to warn this way.
I won’t elaborate much on the highly uncertain business context. You are fully aware of it. My purpose today is to share more of what is specific to us.
First thing, until we got September financial results, we were in line with our expectations. But September business took a hit and forced us to drastically adjust the year-end forecast.
What hit us had mostly to do with our North American business, which represents around 40% of our group sales. Two major causes. The first one, we decided to stop our operations with the largest tire wholesaler in the U.S. as of 1st of July. This decision led to important volumes missing in Q3 versus last year, as we have been redirecting sales flows to other wholesalers. This one-off transition period
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