Corner Office Café—Pat D’Eramo
September 26, 2025Comments
This segment of Corner Office Café features my conversation with Pat D’Eramo, CEO at Martinrea Intl. D’Eramo has extensive metal forming and product-manufacturing experience, having throughout his career provided global leadership in manufacturing, engineering, purchasing, logistics, sales and business development, as well as vehicle-manufacturing operations.
Meet Martinrea CEO Pat D’Eramo at PMA’s Auto Parts Supplier Conference, to be held Oct. 28-29 in Nashville. D’Eramo will offer insights and share experiences in the PMA Member Panel Discussion from a Tier’s Perspective on Current Automotive Issues session. Register here.
Before you became CEO at Martinrea, you held leadership positions at Dana, Toyota, Nummi and GM. Which credos and management principles did you take with you?
I’ve been fortunate to work for some great companies and leaders, and I’ve picked up something valuable from each stop along the way. I started my career at Saturn, which had a very different culture, one where people were truly involved in decisions and that shaped a lot of how I think about leadership.
From there, my time at Nummi and Toyota had the biggest impact. Toyota’s Production System and its philosophy around continuous improvement, teamwork and respect for people resonated with me and still guide how I lead today.
At Martinrea, we have 10 principles that define who we are, and our core principle is “treat people with dignity and respect.” We’ve made tough decisions, even parting ways with leaders who delivered strong financial results but didn’t live up to that principle.
I believe people are at their best when they feel supported and respected. Our role as leaders is to create an environment where they can succeed and help them find the right fit. Sometimes that means moving someone into a different role, and when we do that thoughtfully, we’ve seen people thrive.
I also believe in handling challenges privately and respectfully. If someone’s struggling, that conversation happens one-on-one, never in front of others. I give a lot of credit to my staff and our leaders across Martinrea. They take care of their people, and that makes all the difference.
Since you became CEO in 2014, Martinrea has grown from a $3.23 billion company to an over $5 billion company. To what do you attribute this success?
Our success comes down to focus, discipline and the incredible people we have at Martinrea. From day one, we knew we had to strengthen our launch capability, because in our industry, that’s one of the toughest things to get right. We invested a lot of time and energy into improving launches, along with productivity, quality and all the things our OEM customers expect from a world-class supplier.
Just before the pandemic, we secured a tremendous amount of new business—so much so that we had to build new plants and expand existing ones. Then the world shut down, and we had to launch all of that in the middle of COVID.
On top of that, literally a week before COVID shut the world down, we acquired Metalsa’s six body-in-white plants, and had to integrate those facilities while navigating global travel restrictions and supply-chain chaos.
