Back in the early sixties, when teenagers were falling in love with their Mustangs,
Fred Hay '66 didn't think much about automobiles.
Certainly he didn't think that thirty years later, automobiles would be just about all he would think about. Automobile parts, that is.
Today Fred Hay, who claims that before and during college he “didn't have a clue about what I wanted to do,” is president of Interior Systems and Components: United Technologies Automotive, a division of United Technologies and one of the leading distributors of interior auto parts in the world.
“I assumed I wanted to go into business,” says Hay, who majored in economics and received an M.BA from Indiana State University in 1970. “But I knew I was headed for the military after graduation.” And he also had football and lacrosse to concentrate on, so professional life could wait.
Hay enlisted in the Army, avoided a tour in Vietnam when the military cancelled his orders at the last moment, and spent his military days as an officer in the Atlanta Army supply depot.
The Ford Motor Company gave Hay
his first job after graduate school. During the next eleven years, the company gave him seven more jobs, moving him from automobile financing to corporate finance to strategic planning.
His tenure with Ford's long-term planning arm coincided with the Mideast oil embargoes and the Japanese invasion of the U.S. automobile market. “We realized that we were going to have to stop the broad diversification plans we had made at Ford and get back to basics,” Hay recalls. “We simply had to focus on making vehicles, take the competition head-on, and basically just try to survive.”
It was while managing this latest crisis at Ford that Hay realized he wanted to switch to the supplier side of the automobile business. When United Technologies Automotive offered him a job as vice president of strategic planning, flay leaped at the opportunity to work for the smaller and faster-moving company.
Today he is president of an operation that includes twenty-five plants throughout the world and does between $650 and $700 million worth of business. His division supplies components such as roof systems, door trim panels, steering wheels, and dashboards not only to GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but also to Korean and Japanese automakers.
“I don't have to worry about whether people buy Japanese or American cars as much as I do about specific lines of cars that we supply with components,” he says.
Hay has seen major changes in the U.S. auto industry as companies have moved from ordering parts that their engineers demanded to operating with suppliers to find out the most cost-effective designs for cars. Hay and UTA will work with a company from day one to design a car with the lowest possible production costs and sticker prices.
With the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the expansion of the U.S. auto industry into Mexico, Hay's group will be
expanding right along with the Big Three. “We're going to be expanding the total number of cars built and sold in North America and that can only help the industry as a whole,” he explains. “We [UTA] simply have to be where our customers build their cars. Especially since some of our products are bulky and difficult to ship.”
In addition, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Hay also notes the possibilities for expansion into Eastern Europe. Companies will build plants there to take advantage of the low cost of labor, he says; once the workers start earning more money of their own, they'll want to buy more cars.
One thing that has remained stable through the years is the nature of the auto business, which Hay says operates in a constant state of, well, crisis.
“There's just so much tough competition,” he says, “and so much money invested that you have no choice but to move as quickly as you can.” Just put on your seat belt and head into the fast lane, one might say.