Thanks for the break. You saw the first part of my interview with Mary Barra, the Chair and CEO of General Motors. One segment isn't enough to cover this great American company, so let's get back into it. Mary, I have been blown away by your capital allocation. I know that sounds like it's pedestrian, but the fact is, you have a great buyback. You've bought back 37% of the stock since you got here. It's meant a huge amount to shareholders. How did you know to go that way and not dividend?
Well, I think when we looked at it, as I said before, we fundamentally believe the company is undervalued. And so, you know, the management team works with our board and we look at what is really going to create the most from a shareholder value perspective. And we have, as you say, many shareholders are very happy about it. But that's one of the things I focused on when I took this role. I think in the company in the past, we hadn't been as disciplined as we should be about capital allocation, that it's got to generate a return because this is our owners' money. So that's the focus we always have. We believe the company and the stock share price today is undervalued. So we think it's a great opportunity to continue to create value.
Right now, one of the things that I think that you've been doing that is hard to quantify how much it means is supply chain management, whether it be a deal with Micron for memory chips, whether it be anything else, but it's also trying to get around tariffs and do supply chain management, try to keep the cost of your vehicles low, but move stuff back and forth and back and forth. How are you able to deal with an environment where it seems to change all the time, to be able to continue to do supply chain management in a disciplined way?
I think we have one of the... well, the people of General Motors are what make this possible. I think now our superpower is agility. And so from a supply chain, you know, again, they lived through COVID where we had, you know, any given day you were going to learn that you weren't going to get a part. When we went through the semiconductor [shortage]. And I think what we did is we built partnerships with our suppliers and instead of, you know, calling in and being difficult with them, we're just like, okay, what's the problem? How can we work? How can we solve it? Here's where we need you to build, use your capacity for this. And I think we've been building on that relationship. And so the relationships help, but also it's the team that's looking ahead of what's the next thing coming. I mean, we've all seen the supply chain disrupted again with data centers and some of the demands that they have. Our team continually says, okay, let's get ahead of that. So I have to give them all the credit.
Now talk to me a little bit about the autonomous vehicles. Are they a threat to car manufacturers? If we all ended up having them, then, well, at a certain point we don't need to buy our own car. But at the same time, it's something that is definitely the future no matter what.
You know, this prediction, ever since the early days of what I call rideshare 1.0 with Uber and with Lyft, people... I remember there was an analyst report and written that, you know, car sales would drop 40%. They haven't because, I mean, people still value that. It's in my driveway. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want. So I think that's going to be important. But we think personal autonomy is going to be important. That's where we're focused on from an autonomous [standpoint]. You know, we're not in the taxi business. We're not in the bus business. That's when we made the decision from a capital allocation about not continuing with Cruise. When we looked at the capital that we were going to...
It was a tough decision, but I think it was the right decision. We've been able to preserve a lot of that team. They're working on personal autonomy. I was just in a vehicle a couple of weeks ago, and the progress... I was in March and I was just in it again. I said, hey, I've got to do this almost every month. They're making so much progress on our goal to have eyes off, hands off in the '28 time frame. So we think we're going to be well positioned from a personal autonomy perspective. And again, when people want to drive, they can. When they don't, they won't need to.
Now, I remember GM as really part of, if not integral to, the arsenal of democracy in World War II. We are short of lots of military equipment. You decided to do something about it?
Well, you know, we started GM Defense about five years ago because we felt that we could really leverage our parts bin, leverage what we do. So we started with the infantry squad vehicle, and now there's demand for over 10,000 of those vehicles as we move forward. But also leveraging energy storage, that's been also a business that GM Defense has been growing. But then when we see the shortage that we have now, we know how to scale up quickly. Remember, we built ventilators in 30 days. And so now I was very pleased with the partnership that we have with Lockheed Martin to be able to deliver parts in less than 30 days that we're constraining them. So that's, again, the know-how that we have from a manufacturing perspective that we think we can help with a model that partners with the big defense companies and enables them to get the parts that they need. It's good for the country and also lowers costs.
Right. Talk to me about China. China is both an existential threat. Look, if your government is subsidizing cars, they can beat anybody. But on a level playing field, I don't know if they can versus your lineup.
