COVID Shutdown Update #8 May 8, 2020
Next week marks the partial restart of operations at the company. Our Detroit facility restarts assembly for RECARO on Monday, and the Alabama facility resumes production for Honda on Tuesday. Applicable government stay-at-home orders are being lifted – including, importantly, in Mexico, from which many of our components is sourced – and key COVID-19 infection trends in Michigan and Alabama are stable or improving.
One of the great strengths of our company, of course, is its status as an Adient joint venture.
A publicly-traded shareholder with global reach is invaluable in times such as these, and Adient’s recently released quarterly results confirm this. The industry’s restart is going quite well in Asia and Europe for Adient. Coupled with already-strong performance fundamentals across the company, the result is an enterprise well-positioned for the restart in the Americas. All of this is good for Bridgewater. I urge everyone to review Adient’s earnings release statement, and the recent update by Adient CEO Doug DelGrosso, both of which are available at Adient’s website.
There is a lot of information about the COVID-19 virus pandemic in the news media every day, not all of which is consistent. It can be difficult to ascertain truth from falsehood, and this adds anxiety to the challenges we already face. I expect many of you will have questions upon returning to work, only some of which we have answered in advance. I repeat, therefore, a comment from my April 9th update: “A successful restart at Bridgewater will require flexible engagement by all our employees, and a team approach. When you return, be patient with one another and the managers, and give each other the benefit of doubt.”
The management team has done its level best to obtain the most thorough, highly-vetted, benchmarked, science-based information from across industries to develop the new safety protocols and procedures that await your return. It has been our highest priority during the shutdown, and our new standards are state-of-the art for the automotive industry, globally.
As there are additional advances in the fight against COVID-19, we will adjust our protocols to embrace them. Monitoring developments in testing technology and availability, tracing efforts by public health officials, and vaccine research will remain areas of highest focus for me, and we will make improvements as they become available.
Let us not waste the opportunity borne of this crisis. If we all embrace the heightened vigilance around safety this new reality requires, the resulting culture will further propel our class-leading excellence as a production firm, and continue to expand our opportunities.
Many of you will recall, and others have heard, the company has a history of overcoming challenges. Its unlikely inception in 1998-1999. The 2008-2009 recession. 2015-2016 leadership succession and the Adient spinoff. Recovering from the impacts of this pandemic, stronger than before, is our next challenge. Let’s go get it.
See you soon.
Ron
Ronald E. Hall
President & CEO