DEARBORN, MI —

Every other week, aftermarketNews.com offers an interview with high-profile individuals in the automotive aftermarket. We give executives free rein to express their views on anything from the state of their corporations to recent legislative news to future trends in their niche markets. Here you see what matters to the newsmakers themselves.

Our latest edition of “Executive Interview” features Greg Gyllstrom, Vice President and General Manager for Visteon’s North American and Asian aftermarket operations. In this role, Gyllstrom is responsible for expanding the organization’s North American and Asian aftermarket business by coordinating and directing the company’s sales, product development and marketing activities.

Before joining Visteon in October 2002, Gyllstrom worked at Freudenberg-NOK where he was CEO of Corteco, the company’s automotive aftermarket business. Prior to that, he was president and CEO of Industrial Coating Group Inc., a manufacturer of industrial and commercial coatings.

Gyllstrom’s more than 20 years of sales and marketing management experience in the industrial and automotive industries was earned from other key executive roles at Reeves International and The Brady Co. In his role as COO for Reeves, Gyllstrom was responsible for all manufacturing and commercial site activities. During his tenure at Brady, he managed six stand-alone business divisions in North America.

Gyllstrom recently talked with aftermarketNews.com about his first two years at Visteon, the company’s motor sports initiatives and its presence in Asia.

It was in October 2002, that you joined Visteon, as vice president and general manager of the company’s North American and Asian aftermarket operations, is that correct? How have your first few years been?

Yes, it was a little less than two years ago. It’s been terrific. Visteon is a collection of a lot of different businesses and we’ve been very fortunate to be able to point the ship in the right direction for each business (about a half-dozen businesses) that we have. We are in excess of about $1 billion.

But the really fun part about doing this is, if you want to change the game, start showing up with some new products. Those are the real ‘game changers.’ We’re very fortunate that we’ve got a lot of new things that are just hitting the market.

Please give our readers some background on Visteon’s involvement in the aftermarket.

There’s a component of our business, we’ll call it underhood parts. Under that umbrella would be things like our climate products. That would be: radiators, air conditioning products, which is a pretty extensive line. We also have remanufactured starters and alternators, which come out of our Tennessee facility. Then, we also have businesses related to steering and other underhood parts. That’s one major component.

Another major component is one of the larger OE players. We also manage the OE service side of the house as well. So, for every OE launch, whether it’s to Ford or General Motors or Nissan, we have the OES responsibility in terms of the service parts.

Another really exciting part of our business is mobile electronics. That’s not only product sales business, but it’s also a rather extensive service business where we can provide same-day exchange service at the dealer level. For example, if you took your car in and talked to the service writer and said “well my radio or my CD player is broken.” You would most likely return at the end of the day and hear: “Yes, it is broken and we ordered a new one, and when it comes in we’ll call you” and you have to make another appointment. Well, our service allows us on a local basis, once the service writer has determined that the product is broken, we can show up with an exchange-out product, so that when you arrive back at the dealer the same day, the darn thing is actually fixed.

Another product line that is just launching is a product called TACNET. This is the ‘next generation’ police car. If you’ve ever been inside a police car, you know, it’s a jumble of radios, radar, video systems, light systems, laptop computers. It’s just a mass of junk sitting in the front seat. What we’ve done is we’ve integrated all those systems into a hardened computer in the trunk and it’s controlled by voice demand, touch screen and heads-up display. It’s been testing for some time and is currently in use in California Highway Patrol. We also had about six or eight of these units helping to protect the Boston Democratic Convention. They’ve put these units into special service. They are highly capable cars in that, if you remember on 9/11 the police department couldn’t talk to the fire department, which couldn’t talk to the ambulances. People were running into buildings when another service was saying ‘Get out.’ What TACNET brings is inter-operability, meaning one system can talk to another based on the TACNET car. We think it’s really a step forward in terms of law enforcement and safety.

Among the new initiatives that Visteon has been focusing on recently is increased participation in motor sports. What’s behind this move?

We’ve had a fairly long history with NASCAR already in that our radiators have been a part of most of the cars that have raced in the series for quite some time. We supply our technology to a company called C&R Racing. They take our product and turn it into a racing radiator. So, together, we’re already in the race. Every time a car goes across the finish line to win the race, we’ve won too.

What we’re doing this time is a little different. We’ve got so many new things to launch that we’re celebrating it by sponsoring Bill Elliot. As you know, Bill is on a limited schedule this year with the Evernham Team. We’ve had a really special relationship with Ray Evernham and his team. We discovered that this opportunity was available to sponsor Bill Elliot at the Brickyard 400 on Aug. 8. We had about 60 to 80 customers there. It was a terrific celebration, not only for our climate business, being the radiator side, but also our glass distribution channel as well.

As you look at each of our businesses, each of them has its own unique distribution channel.

Is this the first NASCAR sponsorship for the company?

Yes, it is a first for us. We’ve been in Formula 1. We’ve been in CART Racing. We’ve been in road racing with the Panoz organization. But this is really our first time in NASCAR. Bill Elliot is an old friend of the company and it worked out well.

We’ve been told that approximately 90 percent of the cars in NASCAR use Visteon radiators, is this true? How did this happen, is it part of a strategic effort by Visteon?

Yes, that’s an accurate number. NASCAR, as you know, is all about performance and technology. Whatever works the best is what they are going to use. At the end of the day, I’m not paying them to use our radiators. They are buying them. So, if they weren’t the best out there, they wouldn’t be used. We’re very proud of that.

The other side of it too, and probably more importantly, not everybody is a student of NASCAR, but we are. NASCAR has 75 million fans. Twenty-five percent of that number is what we call a hardcore fan. The hardcore fan spends 15 hours per week investigating, looking up web sites, reading magazines, doing something NASCAR-related not including the race. Think about that. If the race itself is two-to-three hours, plus 15 hours. Can you imagine someone spending 18 hours a week on NASCAR? In terms of the demographics, our installer base – the professional installer – is a NASCAR fan.

Another angle from which Visteon is utilizing motor sports as a marketing vehicle is through the new licensed NASCAR performance windshields and the new GlassVantage Network. Can you tell our readers more about this?

The NASCAR Performance Windshield celebrates NASCAR as a brand. It’s one of the top brands in the U.S. In the shade band of the windshield is the NASCAR logo coupled with a checkerboard motif. It allows, in a replacement windshield, the NASCAR fan to celebrate his or her lifestyle or allegiance to the sport. This is available through about 25 of the leading SKUs — in other words, the most popular cars, the most popular trucks. They are also exclusively available through something we call the GlassVantage Network. Because we are selling an OE quality windshield, believe it or not, the windshield is actually part of the safety system of a car or truck. Part of the rigidity of the chassis, part of the crush strength of the roof is the window system and how it’s integrated into it. There are a lot of windshields out there obviously. We have a 15-step installation system. Being that we are a major player in OE windshields, we will only allow our windshields to be installed through our network.

Along those same lines, with more consumers accessorizing their cars, tell us about the new dockable entertainment system that Visteon has developed.

Vehicle personalization. We also display at the SEMA show. The marketplace that SEMA represents is about a $9 billion marketplace. It’s expected to grow something like $16 billion in the next few years. That is massive growth. What it’s all about, like the NASCAR Performance Windshield, is people will spend disposable income to personalize their car or truck. The average expenditure on a pickup truck post-sale, the average consumer spends $2,000 to accessorize his truck. That’s disposable income. We call it a ‘want’ product versus a ‘need’ product. We see that as a very attractive market. In the case of vehicle personalization, the manufacturers are making money, the dealers are making money, the installers are making money. What a wonderful happenstance!

The NASCAR Performance Windshield easily falls into that category, along with our new GlideMaster products. If you are familiar with the slider in the back of a pickup truck, a slider today is kind of an old box in frame design and it’s a rather stodgy looking design. What we’ve done is taken a single piece of glass and it gives the appearance of being flush-mounted. You’ve got a very clean look on the back of the truck, but yet the winder operates like a normal slider. It’s really a very attractive design. We can also combine that with the NASCAR personalization. We’re trying to reinvent all the categories in glass.

The dockable DVD kind of marries that vehicle personalization concept with the mobile electronics craze toward video. What the dockable DVD is, think of a laptop DVD player, a 10 inch screen, it weighs about 2.5 pounds and it docks in the roof of your SUV, minivan or even in your car. We install a docking station that fits flush right up into the roof of the vehicle. Then this dockable DVD player fits up inside the docking station. The screen flips down. The screen which would normally be upside down in that configuration, automatically reconfigures so that it is right side up. The other thing that it does, without a real difficult installation, it is FM modulated, so basically you tune your stereo into a certain band and it plays the movie on your dockable DVD through the sound system on your car.

Kind of like the old real estate joke: location, location, location. For me it’s: new products, new products, new products.

What about Asia, many U.S. auto parts suppliers, including Visteon, have been increasing their presence in the Asian automotive aftermarket. Visteon is expanding in the region and recently opened a technical center and corporate office in the region. To what do you attribute the increasing interest in this region, for parts suppliers? What are the differences that you see in the U.S. and Asian markets?

Visteon has had a long history in Asia through Visteon facilities as well as an extensive list of joint ventures. To signify the importance of what is happening there, we recently moved our headquarters from Tokyo to Shanghai and with that came the new technical center.

Our new dockable DVD player, while we created the idea and the spec here in the U.S., most of the engineering and most of the work was done over there. It’s all about speed-to-market. From a cost perspective that is what it takes to compete. That applies across all the product lines. Frankly, our primary focus so far in Asia has been the OE market and we really haven’t made a big statement yet as far as the aftermarket in Asia goes.

The collaboration is already happening. We like to think of doing our product development on a 24/7 basis, because when Detroit, Mich., goes to bed, Asia is waking up and we can keep working on the same thing. We have a large engineering footprint in China, as well as purchasing, manufacturing, everything you would expect. But it is about the global speed to market, not just cost.

To check out Visteon’s new products, go to: www.evisteon.com.

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