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General Motors is pulling its 2025 earnings guidance and pausing share buybacks amid tariff uncertainty. This as White House press secretary, Carolyn Levitt confirms President Trump will sign an executive order on auto tariffs today, expected to soften the impact of levies on the sector. Joining me now, Etai Michaelis, TD Cowen's Equity Analyst. Always great to speak with you, Etai. What does all of this mean for GM? Scrapping guidance, fee freezing pri buybacks and net income slide, where does it leave you on the stock?

Sure, yeah. Uh thank you for having me. So really no surprise. It's a solid quarter from GM, a modest beat. Uh pretty much all around. I think it does make sense given the near-term uncertainty to pause uh the open market share repurchases. We've seen other companies do that in the space as well. And given to your point just kind of yesterday's developments with tariffs and I think the company wanted a couple more days to digest the news before they come back to the market and update the 2025 guidance. So, makes a lot of sense to us. But overall the quarter was solid and now we're eagerly awaiting uh Thursday's updates.

And talk me through the pull forward dynamic and whether or not you're seeing that in GM's earnings here because obviously net income sliding in the first quarter. To what extent does that indicate to you that consumers weren't interested in pre purchasing from GM before the tariffs were put into effect?

Yeah, we did see some signs of a pre-buy in the US for new vehicles in the month of March. Uh although, it did come out of GM's inventory so inventory ended up lower than expected. Uh we do still see some pent-up demand though in the US. We do think underlying auto demand is relatively strong with the consumers from our survey work at TD Cowen. Consumers do want to increase their cars per household in the next couple of years per our survey back in February. So underlying auto demand trends were strong throughout Q1. But you're right, we did see some pre-buy uh in March. We could see maybe some of that into the second quarter. Uh but overall, if you look at GM's market share performance in Q1, the pricing performance in Q1, the success of their new products, the company does continue to execute well and perform very well overall.

Etai on the uh international spectrum here we saw good strength in uh China and elsewhere, other countries as well too. Um do you see that continuing? Um I I saw the ebit uh for international was up uh close to uh uh 150% and China over uh over it was negative in China is up positive 45 million ebit for uh for the China income. Do you see that continuing or is that part of the pull forward you're talking about?

Yeah, the international probably didn't see a pull forward. Uh GM International did come in a little bit below our forecast in Q1. But you're right, they had been making some progress in China. It's been very challenging for GM in China. They've done a number of restructuring actions there. So we do think see prospects for improvement there over the next couple of years uh in the international business, but most of the pull forward uh really was concentrated in the US starting uh in the month of March.

And I want to broaden the conversation out of it Etai, because you cover so many of the auto makers. President Trump is expected to soften auto tariffs at a rally tonight. I I'm curious which of the auto makers that you cover do you anticipate rallying the most when we wake up to the opening bell tomorrow morning off the back of those announcements of soften tariffs for automakers?

Absolutely. We're still waiting a lot more detail and definitely some open questions and clarifications. But if you kind of look at just the relief on the parts tariffs themselves, yeah that would benefit companies uh that have a fair amount of US footprint. Um and Ford certainly has more US vehicle manufacturing footprint than GM. Tesla of course produces all their vehicles uh in the US in terms of the North America footprint. So those companies would stand to benefit uh more just because they're more exposed to uh parts tariffs. Any relief again waiting for more detail but any relief on parts tariffs would accrue kind of all else being equal to companies that are more exposed to them uh in the context of the overall tariff situation. GM of course would be exposed as well. But still a significant footprint in both Mexico and Canada. Um and so I'll have to kind of see whether there's any future uh relief on those as well. But for now from what we've read uh the immediate relief seems to be focused on on the parts uh predominantly as well as some of the stacking tariffs uh that that have been in question as well.