HIGHLIGHTS: Karin Rådström - CEO of Daimler Truck

0:00Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. So today we are in very good company with Karin Rolström, the CEO and president of Daimler Truck, which is the largest commercial vehicle producer in the world. Karin has recently been named Sweden's most important businesswoman in Daimler Truck. And at Daimler Truck, she is driving the conversion of legacy diesel champion into a future ready mobility powerhouse. Now, Colin, you combine engineering background, your Scania background, with a background in elite sport.

0:35So a warm welcome. Thank you. So now you and I, we are going into a truck. Okay, you are sitting in the driving seat. I'm sitting next to you. And now you're going to tell me what makes a good truck. What do you look for? Well, the cab is like the driver's living room. So that's what I look for, basically. Is it practical? Is there storage space? How's the bed? Of course, also, how do you interact with the truck? Yeah, but I honestly, I was thinking it didn't really change so much with all the new trends, with electrification, digitalization. It's still a living room and a working office. So when people buy a truck, what are the decisive elements?

1:24what is it that make you win the purchase? Well, I think it depends which perspective you take. So now we started with the driver perspective, which is the cab and the living space, but of course also that the truck does the job. And I think they're still kind of old school, so they want to go faster up the hill than their colleague with the other brand. So that's still important. But then, of course, usually the people, deciding which brand to buy are the owners and they look for the whatever truck will give them the best cost of operation because they're running a business so why do you have so many brands you go you know Freightliner Mercedes Fuso Western Star is it easier just to have one yeah we have we have even more actually but it comes from history and and they all stand for different things for the customers, I would say.

2:22So if I give an example on the coach side, we have Cetra, which is actually positioned higher than Mercedes-Benz. And that's something we acquired now many years ago. So that has a higher brand value than Mercedes for a coach customer. And why would you take that away? Or Western Star in the US, that's a super strong brand for like heavy duty timber construction. So it makes sense to keep most brands. Then of course sometimes we buy stuff where we might consider changing the brand too. Another thing is of course the decarbonization kind of dilemma. How are you going to get to zero emission? Yeah it's a good question.

3:12So we have developed electric trucks, so we basically can offer electric trucks in almost all use cases. In the US, we see environmental legislation kind of rolled back. So we believe it will just slow down significantly now. And it will probably take to beyond 2030 before we see it picking up again. while in Europe we have very tough legislation that pushes electrification. I think the challenge there is that for our customer to transition from diesel to electric, there needs to be three things in place and we usually say it's like an equation. So you need to have the truck and that's obviously, we have one available, so do our competitors.

4:06you need to have TCO so cost of operations needs to be competitive and there it starts to get there I would say in some use cases especially if you drive longer distances because the truck is always going to be more expensive to buy electric than a diesel but then the running cost is lower and we also see like in Germany we have the road toll system the MAUT which has an advantage for electric trucks which is around 30 cents per kilometer so it's like the cost of operation starts to be comparable and then the third part of the equation is the infrastructure to be able to charge in the depot or along the route and I believe that's the most difficult challenge to solve and then maybe coming back to where we started as you know if you have an equation and one part is zero nothing happens so where we really need to see more initiatives and more speed is on the infrastructure side so how do you cope with this situation where europe is you know full speed ahead and the us is kind of pressing on the on the break you know yeah well there were some projects that we planned to have as global projects like battery platforms and stuff where we are now looking like, can we do more with partners?

5:36Can we de-risk to buy for a longer time things that we were planning to develop ourselves? So I think that's kind of stepwise looking at, because there's also in Europe uncertainty how quickly it's going to scale. And like in everything we do, we try to think of the low volume scenario and the high volume scenario. So as an example, when we were integrating the electric trucks into the production line, we do it on the same line as where we're producing the diesel. And that way we can really balance depending on how the demand develops. What are your most important leadership principles? Someone who worked for me some years ago, she described it quite well.

6:23Tough love, she said. And I thought that was good because I'm quite demanding. It's maybe one of the things I still need to work on. Like I'm never really, or it's not like I'm unhappy, but I always want to take it to the next level. So we reached like a milestone. I'm already thinking about the next one. And I could probably get better at showing appreciation, but I'm tough. So always pushing forward, but hopefully I do it in a way that I also show that I care about the people. And I want them to grow. And I try to push them a little bit to do things they didn't dare to do. Take decisions, as we talked about, making them really accountable.

7:06So that's the one part. And then I rely a lot on the team, probably more than other CEOs. I spend a lot of time consciously building the team, also getting to know each other. maybe not we don't have to be privately you know best friends but personally really understanding the driving forces and getting to the level where you can be vulnerable with each other and kind of get power from the team so that's important for me if we were to look at those two things given that you have been on the national rowing team in sweden for several years and rowing in world championships and so on. The first thing about setting new goals and pushing to new standards and so on.

7:55I'm sorry, this is a leading question. But I'm sorry. Sorry, let me just rephrase it. How do you think your background in sports has influenced your leadership principles? If you do the first one first, setting new goals and that kind of thing. It's pretty obvious. So I think that's where I learned it. and it's like that's what professional sports is all about it's like about constantly pushing yourself to the next level and for me it was like I never thought I would at first my dream was to win a Swedish championships and then I reached that very quickly my brain is recalibrating I want to make the national team and then I want to row in the world cup and stuff so I think that's that's just how I work and I think it's also a prerequisite to get there and in the day-to-day it's even more concrete because it's like you know you do something brutal like the worst thing as a rower I think is intervals on the rowing machine because it's very digital so it tells you exactly so I would do a really hard workout and by the end you know you're falling off the machine lying on the floor basically and you know exactly how you perform and then you go back next week and you can actually do it a little bit better and I think that's so that comes from there and that I think made me that's also what makes it fun you can always step by step also in in Daimler truck now we do small things and then when you zoom out over time you see we're really moving Thank you.