Joseph R. Hinrichs - Ford Motor Co.
Analyst
Yes, Jim, thanks. First of all, over time, as Bob has highlighted on a number of calls, our raw material costs follow the curves in the market, so we have some ups and downs based on where we are in the cycle. But as you know, we negotiate our steel contracts on a quarterly basis. We spread them out so we can average things out and don't have so much risk. As far as the supply base goes, they're Tier 2s et cetera. Most of the time, they're bearing that risk. And there are occasions where we will direct-source and will be a part of the Tier 2 sourcing of raw materials. But there is some, obviously, some of the risk and reward that goes in the supply base. I'd just remind everybody that we've gotten a good balance of the upside when the commodity markets were going the other direction. So I don't see us changing our strategy dramatically with the supply base. When it comes to raw materials, we both manage the risk and reward together. But as Jim was saying, when you look at the architecture strategy and the lessons that we've learned on One Ford and the way Jim described it, there's value globally in using flexible architectures, and we've talked about our five that we're going to use. Where we've learned is really the modules within the vehicle need flexibility to be able to offer differentiation for the regional markets. And scale of the supply base occurs on the scale of the manufacturing plant locally, not on a global basis. So for example, if you have a corner module, the demand, the costs, and attributes may be different in China than they are in the U.S., but it may be the same vehicle architecture, but the module that we're going to use may be different for Asia than it is for the United States. Whereas in the past, a lot of our global platform vehicles were global across their modules as well as the platform architecture. So that's a very important nuance. Maybe it's not a nuance, but it's a very important part of our new strategy, which is to offer a catalog of modules for each of the regions to pick from for their vehicles, but still take advantage of the five core architectures that we'll use globally. So we can get the advantage of the engineering skill, the platform level, and take advantage of the local scale from the supply base and the country-specific attributes in the region.