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At 63, John F. Fielder, Chairman and CEO of BorgWarner Inc. , has spent 40 years in the automobile industry, but he still acts like a 16-year-old who has just been given dad’s keys. He often tells us that he loves cars. Recently, he had a talk with our correspondent Michael Arndt.
     Car sales held up remarkably well through this recession. And while Borg. Warner’s profiles fell, you still made money. What’s the trick?
     This is my ninth downturn, and we finally got this one right. If you go back to the mid-1980’s, people were using 12% of their monthly disposable income to make a car payment. In 1999, that figure was 7%. In the past downturns, the first thing people did was to postpone car purchases. This time we surveyed people, and they said, "No, I’m not going to cut back on a car."
     We also have a lot more real-time information. We could react faster. A lot of people think the auto industry got passed by the dot-corns and e-businesses. We didn’t. We put in a lot of information systems. I can pull up on my computer right now Ford’s inventories at all their plants, because we have data coming to us. We have less than a week’s inventory of anything in our company.
     For long-term growth, are you banking on Asia and Latin America?
     If your time frame is the rest of this decade, no, because the income isn’t there yet. If your time frame is longer -- several decades -- those are the growth markets. But in the next decade, Europe will be our fastest growing market.
     What about moving your factories to low-cost emerging markets?
     What’s happening in the world is counterintuitive. The yen is getting weaker and weaker, and yet the, Japanese are putting more and more plants in the U.S. What people have learned is if you don’t make it in the market, you are not likely to sell it there for any length of time.
     I thought the trend was toward a "world car".
     People around the world don’t want a world car. Here is a real-life example. One of our best operations in the U.S. is one that makes gear boxes for SUVs. That technology doesn’t do any good in Europe -- they don’t use that product. Yet European will pay about $800 more for a very fuel-efficient engine. At their prices of gasoline, they can pay that $800 off in about a year.
     Auto makers are notorious for squeezing suppliers. How can you take that year after year?
     Well, our average yearly price reduction isn’t the 3% to 5% you read about, It’s more like 1%, and we offset that with honest-to-God cost savings. If we can’t do it, we get out of the business.
     You drive a different car every year. What was your all-time favorite model?
     My favorite was ’55 Chevy Bel-Air coupe. I always remembered it as a great car. I’ve gone back and driven one recently and it’s not really a great car. My memories of it are much better than the car.