00:00 Speaker A
Lots going on here from both an EV and also an ice or gas powered car, uh, situation here. For me now, Steve Center, CEO, Kia America. Thanks again for joining us. I really appreciate it. Before we get into these exciting vehicles, one right behind us. I got to talk to you about the topic of the day here is tariffs. You know, last time we spoke, uh, we we we talked about it briefly. We didn’t talk about it post Trump’s 25% sector tariffs, right? So what’s sort of your response now? You know, you said last time you said we’re not going to follow business rules, right? So what does that mean?
00:47 Speaker B
Oh, this is very complicated. And, uh, the, uh, the impact of this is very unclear. Although I can say a couple things. Affects the whole industry, affects every automaker differently, depending on where your parts came from now. The metal and the parts comes from, the cars finally assembled. Um, so every segment isn’t impacted the same way. So for instance, our, uh, K4 is assembled in Mexico. Some of our competitors’ products might not be. So in terms of how you interpret all this, we’re trying to understand what the bill’s going to be and how we’re going to deal with it. We don’t have any imminent plans to raise prices as a result. We want to understand what the impact is and see how the market materializes going forward.
02:13 Speaker A
You know, a lot of other automakers are saying it’s either it’s day by day, week by week, even hour by hour based on how things are changing. Uh, and you’re talking about how prices sort of staying the same for now. But one way that you can sort of control costs, we’ve talked about this, is building in America. And that’s what you’re doing with some of these vehicles, right?
02:41 Speaker B
We do. And we absolutely do. We we’ve had for, uh, well over a decade, a factory in West Point, Georgia, where we build the Telluride. We build the Sorento. We build the Sportage there. And we just started building the EV9 and the EV6 in the same factory. So we did a couple of things. We proved you can build internal combustion cars and EVs in the same factory. That’s huge. As well, we just opened the meta plant, uh, outside of Savannah, Georgia on the other side of the state. And, um, that has, uh, over a 500,000 capacity. So as you grow, you want to shorten your supply lines. Uh, there’s a battery factory complex there and the vehicle assembly plant. So we’ll be able to build more components here and more cars here.
03:59 Speaker A
And this is all before this tariff talk.
04:04 Speaker B
Right, right. It was the investment’s already happening. It takes years, billions of dollars.
04:08 Speaker A
Years ago. The car right behind us is the EV4, the new EV that here they viewed here in New York. Is this, first of all, talking about the car, but also is this one of those cars that will be built in America?
04:38 Speaker B
Um, I’m not sure yet. We haven’t announced what we’ll be building at that factory, but we’re building, uh, two other EVs here as as I said. And this is an entry EV sedan meant to come in under the EV6 price wise.
05:09 Speaker A
You know, we’ve been seeing these EV sales in for Kia in America just really taking off. What do you think that’s why is the resonance happening? Is it because of price competitiveness?
05:27 Speaker B
It’s, uh, it’s the products, which includes the price value relationship. Part of our DNA is value. I say value with a small V, meaning it’s got all the technology and the features people want. It’s just not cheap or a low price. Um, uh, we’ve got good products and there’s organic demand for EVs now. We just had a a record first quarter for EVs. So we’re growing. We’re adding to the lineup as you can see. We’re going to continue to grow. We’re going to make the cars here in the US to make them more accessible. So, um, we’re very excited and the Kia dealers are real winners because they now have two lines, an internal combustion line, and they have an EV line in sister segments. Right? If Telluride, you have EV9.