Garrett Motion Inc.

I would like to welcome everyone to the Garrett Motion Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded and a replay will be available later today. After the company's presentation, there will be a Q&A session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Cyril Grangine, Garrett's Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer.

Thank you, Megan. Good day and welcome everyone. Thank you for attending the Garrett Motion Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to mention that today's presentation and earnings press release are available on the IR section of Garrett Motion's website at .garrettmotion.com. You will also find links to our SEC findings along with other important information about the company. We note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Federal Securities Law. These statements, which can be identified by words such as anticipate, intend, plan, believe, estimate, expect, likely, may, should, will, or similar expressions, represent management's expectations and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from such expectations. These risks and uncertainties include the factors identified in our annual report on Form 10-K and other findings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and include risks related to the automotive industry, competitive landscape, and macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions, among others. Please review the disclaimers on slide 2 of our presentation as the content of our call will be governed by this language. Today's presentation also includes certain non-GAAP measures, which we use to help describe how we manage and operate our business. We reconcile each of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in the appendix of our presentation and related press release. Finally, in today's presentation and comments, we may refer to light vehicle diesel and light vehicle gasoline products by using the terms diesel and gasoline only. With us today are Olivier Rabillet, Garrett's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Sean Deason, Garrett's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I will now hand the call over to Olivier.

Thanks, Yaril, and thank you everyone for joining today's call. As you can see on slide 3, Garrett delivered strong results in the first quarter thanks to an outstanding operating performance, delivering a just-debited $153 million with a margin of 18.1%, an increase of 280 basic points compared to Q4 2023. And we achieved that despite the continuous self-sufficiencies that the company experienced thanks to its exposure to light vehicle industry weakness in Europe and in China, as well as the competitive pressures certain OEMs are facing. At the same time, we kept winning new business across all applications, demonstrating the strengths of our technological leadership. But let's get back to operational performance. Our strong operational performance enabled us as well to generate $157 million of adjusted free cash flow in the quarter, allowing us to buy back stock under our share repurchase program, repurchasing a total of $296 million of common stock in 2024. This resulted in a reduction of 13% of our share count at the end of 2024 compared to the end of 2023. Our full-year results continue to demonstrate our ability to flex our valuable cost structure and proactively implement permanent cost actions, which allowed us to deliver a .2% adjusted EBITDA margin for the full year. When you adjust for foreign exchange and the sales of our unconsolidated joint venture in Australia, we delivered an adjusted EBITDA near the midpoint of our initial 2024 guidance, and thus despite the softness we experienced. This is quite remarkable. We believe the actions we have taken in 2024 positioned the company to deliver solid performance in 2025, offsetting again the impact of expected weak global industry production. Excluding foreign exchange, we also expect to deliver similar adjusted EBITDA to 2024. We also expect to generate strong adjusted free cash flow and use it to keep on returning value to our shareholders through a combination of share repurchases, regular quarterly dividends. Our board of directors has indeed authorized a new $250 million million share repurchase program for 2025, and we expect to pay $50 million in dividends throughout the course of the year, with the first quarterly dividend of 6% per share already paid in January. Let me now move to slide four so that we can share the momentum we experience with our customers. Looking at full year 2024, we continue to expand our position in turbo, maintaining our strong business win rate of more than 50%. We secured new light vehicle gasoline wins across all geographies, reinforcing our position in the US and growing in China, especially with new Chinese players. These wins covered all powertrain types, including plug-in hybrids and range extenders, for which we see a growing push from carmakers. We also kept on making significant progress in commercial vehicles across the world. More specifically, we are pleased with the progress we have been making in China, winning several natural gas -the-way applications that will launch as early as 2026. Lastly, we secured new award for marine and backup power applications with our largest turbochargers as we expand our portfolio and we expect production to start also in 2026. Turning now to slide five, I'm very proud of the significant progress we made in 2024, validating our electrification solution with key customers who recognize the benefits of our differentiated technologies. We indeed continue to win with our extensive fuel cell compressor portfolio, the broadest in the industry with -in-class efficiency, and we continue to win new projects for fuel cell applications. With our e-powertrain high-speed technologies, we are seeing several passenger and commercial customers embracing and testing our advanced -in-1 high-speed technology solution. During the year, we've been moving from prototyping to testing in labs and on vehicles to first production awards, expecting to launch as early as 2027. This validates, again, the benefits of the high-speed differentiated electric power-frame solutions that Garrett has focused on. Leveraging on this significant progress, we expect much more to come in 2025. Finally, our e-cooling compression technology is generating significant interest for both automotive and non-automotive applications. On the automotive side, it's a very good fit for battery and cabin cooling for commercial vehicles, and for industrial applications, we see significant interest for residential, office building, rooftop cooling, as well as cooling solutions for data centers and battery farms. I will now turn it over to Sean to provide more insight into our financial results and outlook for 2025.

Thanks, Olivier, and good morning, everyone. I will begin on slide 6. As Olivier highlighted, once again, we delivered strong financial results in a soft industry environment driven by our continuous focus on variable cost management and the implementation of structural cost productivity actions. Fourth quarter net sales were $844 million, slightly up sequentially, stabilizing after declines over the past four quarters, as new program ramp ups offset continued softness in Europe and declines in gasoline and diesel light vehicle production. We recorded fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA of $153 million, up $8 million from $145 million last year. This improvement was driven by variable and fixed cost productivity, deflation, and favorable product mix, partially offset by lower volumes and an unfavorable foreign exchange impact. The performance this quarter once again demonstrated our ability to deliver strong financial performance across industry cycles, as can be seen in the upper right graph. Adjusted EBITDA margin was .1% for the quarter, up from .3% last year, and up sequentially, benefiting from the actions just mentioned. We generated very strong adjusted free cash flow of $157 million in the quarter, up from $137 million in Q4 2023, as we converted our adjusted EBITDA into cash and benefited from a positive working capital contribution. We expect to continue to deliver a 60% adjusted free cash flow conversion on adjusted EBITDA annually, in line with our capital allocation framework. Moving now to slide seven, we show our Q4 and full year net sales bridge by product category, as compared with the same period last year. For Q4, we continue to experience gasoline softness in China and North America, which was partially offset by ramp ups in Europe, comprising 45% of net sales flat from last year. The diesel decline we saw in Q4 year over year was mainly due to lower industry production, primarily in Europe, where we have a higher share of demand. We also saw a slight increase in commercial vehicle sales, which reflects the beginning of an industry recovery in China and North America. As mentioned, for the full year, we experienced both industry declines and demand softness from specific global OEMs due to competitive pressure in the auto space, in some cases forcing them to accelerate platform consolidation. Revenue from our commercial vehicles throughout the year was impacted by economic softness in Europe and North America, but our aftermarket business increased 1% in constant currency due to the continued demand for replacement parts, primarily in China and Europe. Finally, on a full year basis, the passive commodity deflation across all verticals resulted in a 2% sales decline, and foreign exchange was ahead of 34 million dollars and Japanese yen volatility, and a weakening in Europe. Moving now to slide 8, we walk you to our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA of 153 million dollars, representing, again, an 8 million dollar improvement over the same quarter last year. We achieved this strong performance by delivering fixed cost productivity coupled with strong price and inflation recovery. This execution drove significant quarterly margin improvement year over year, allowing us to deliver a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 18.1%. Overall, in the quarter, we delivered 37 million dollars in operating performance improvements year over year, offsetting both volume declines and a negative foreign exchange impact. For the full year, 2024, we delivered adjusted EBITDA performance of 598 million dollars, representing a 37 million dollar decrease from the prior year driven by sales declines and foreign exchange, partially offset by operating performance. Our full year adjusted EBITDA margin was 17.2%, up 90 basis points compared to the prior year. If you adjust for the impact of foreign exchange and divestiture activity during the year, the effect of the volume decline is almost completely offset by our operational performance of more than 100 million dollars and reflects the impact of structural fixed cost productivity actions and our ability to flex our available costs in a volatile industry environment. While the industry environment was challenging in 2024, we continued to increase investment supporting the development of differentiated technologies in both turbo and zero emission applications, increasing spending on R&D by 12 million dollars as compared to the prior year. And turning now to slide nine, I'll walk you through the adjusted EBITDA to adjusted pre-cash flow bridge for the full year, 2024. The company's adjusted pre-cash flow of 358 million dollars represents a 60% adjusted pre-cash flow conversion of adjusted EBITDA in line with our financial framework. We had minimal working capital usage on a full year basis with a strong recovery in 2024 as the industry stabilized. Cash taxes and cash interest were in line with expectations and our capital expenditures of .6% of sales were within our financial framework. Moving now to slide 10, we ended 2024 with a strong liquidity position of 725 million dollars. This is comprised of 600 million dollars of undrawn capacity on a revolving credit facility and 125 million dollars of unrestricted cash. Overall, we significantly improved our financial flexibility in 2024, finishing the year with total debt of 1.5 billion dollars down from 1.7 billion dollars the prior year, reducing our total debt by 203 million dollars in the year and representing a net leverage ratio that remained relatively flat at 2.21 times. During the fourth quarter and throughout 2024, we continued to deliver on our commitment to return significant capital to shareholders. We repurchased 70 million dollars of common stock in the fourth quarter and a total of 296 million dollars during 2024. Compared to a year ago, our share count has been meaningfully reduced by 32 million shares or 13% of shares outstanding compared to the end of 2023. As Olivier mentioned earlier, our board authorized a new share repurchase program of 250 million dollars and we are planning to pay 50 million dollars in dividends in 2025 to be paid quarterly. In early 2025, it's also important to note that we also refinance our term loans, which should generate interest savings of 3 million dollars annually. The new term loan will mature in 2032, extending the maturity of the company's existing term loan by approximately four years. We also refinance and upsize our revolving credit facility to 630 million dollars with a maturity in 2030. Now as we turn to slide 11, I'd like to take the time to introduce that for 2025 and in the future, we will be using adjusted EBIT as a new financial metric. This will provide additional insight into our financial performance and profitability to align with our peer group reporting practice and highlights the strength of our asset-like operating model. For the full year 2024, our adjusted EBIT was 485 million dollars, achieving an industry-leading margin of 14%. Now let's move to slide 12 to see our 2025 outlook for adjusted EBIT and our other financial metrics. You can see our 2025 outlook, which applies the following midpoints. Net sales of 3.4 billion dollars. Net sales growth at constant currency of minus 1%. Net income of 232 million dollars. Adjusted EBITDA of 575 million dollars. Adjusted EBIT of 457 million dollars. Net cash provided by operating activities of 402 million dollars and an adjusted recash flow of 345 million dollars. This outlook reflects an improvement in the commercial vehicle market, both on-highway and off-highway, which will partially offset the continued softness expected in the light vehicle industry. It also includes the continued benefit of the sustainable fixed-cost actions we mentioned earlier, which were implemented in 2024. When we exclude the negative effect of board exchange, our adjusted EBIT does flat in 2025 compared to 2024, and our adjusted EBIT is down only 10 basis points due to a slightly higher stock compensation and depreciation. In this relatively flat revenue environment, we plan to execute productivity gains and pass-through pricing. At the same time, we remain focused on increasing customer interest across all regions and verticals for our zero-emission products, and we expect a slight increase in our R&D spending to .6% of sales, up 10 basis points in 2024. We expect to dedicate greater than 50% of this spend in 2025 to zero-emissions technologies while still meaningfully investing in turbo. On slide 13, you see the walk of adjusted EBITDA from 2024 to our 2025 outlook. As mentioned on the previous slide, our 2025 adjusted EBITDA outlook midpoint is $575 million, a decline of $23 million versus 2024, while keeping margin flat -over-year at 17.2%. The decline is driven by the impact of unfavorable foreign exchange, mainly driven by US dollar depreciation versus the euro. As previously mentioned, excluding foreign exchange, our adjusted EBITDA is expected to be flat versus 2024. We expect to continue to execute on our productivity actions and deliver operational performance, which will offset projected product mix and volume headwinds in 2025. The actions taken in 2024 to improve productivity performance will also continue to benefit the company's performance and preserve strong margins in 2025. Without sacrificing investment in new technologies, which, as previously mentioned, will remain a priority. And with that, I will turn it back over to Olivier for closing remarks. Thank

you, Sean. Let's turn now to slide number 14. Garrett continues to be well positioned for long-term success. We are strengthening our leadership position in the turbo industry while developing new technologies and expanding into industrial applications. Our operational framework is highly cash generative, allowing us to invest in new technologies while reducing debt and returning cash to shareholders. Let's now turn to slide 15. In 2024, we have proven once again the resilience of our financial framework, delivering strong financial results and achieving a .2% adjusted EBITDA margin. Our financial performance positions us well to continue to deliver strong margin and free cash flow in similar industry conditions in 2025. These financial results enabled us to return value to our shareholders through share repurchases, totalling $296 million. And we expect to continue returning significant value to shareholders in 2025 through a combination of additional share repurchase under our new $250 million share repurchase program and $50 million in dividends paid quarterly. In addition, the structural cost actions that we drove in 2024 in anticipation of a softer industrial outlook for 2025 will enable us to continue to deliver strong margin and free cash flow. Once again, we made significant progress this past year across existing and new differentiated technologies, setting the stage for another successful year. Our recent awards and customer recognition for our high-speed solutions for zero emission platforms prove that we are developing the right solution for the next generation of electric vehicles. Lastly, obviously, I want to take the opportunity to thank the entire Garrett team for delivering an outstanding performance in the fourth quarter and the full year and position well the company for success in 2025. Thank you for your time. Operator, we are now ready for Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. This time we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Ahmed Khorstand with BWS Financial. Please go ahead.

Hi. So I just wanted to ask you, how are you managing the year given a lot of the geopolitics and tariffs, and how does that affect your business going into 2025 and 2026?

Ahmed, you're asking a very, very interesting question. Quite frankly, what we are doing is to stay as flexible as possible. It's true that today it's difficult to predict exactly what will happen and when it will happen. We tend to be very fast at reacting. We have already engaged in discussions with customers, and we tend to be very fast at reacting to that kind of events. For lack of a better word, we've been facing a lot of unplanned events for the past years as an industry. We tend to be much more flexible and reactive now than we were probably five years ago. We are trying to anticipate as much as we can, but it's difficult to anticipate in a vacuum. We need to understand what we face.

The next question comes from Michael Ward with Freedom Capital. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Olivia, you mentioned in your presentation China, and I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit. I saw on the 10K the revenue was down, and it sounds like you have some new business with some of the local Chinese-based manufacturers. Can you give a little more detail on what you're looking at in China?

Yeah, absolutely. China is still an important region for us. This is the biggest automotive industry in the world, and we play a significant role in China, both in commercial vehicles and in passenger vehicles. What we have seen over the last few years is there has been not only a shift towards more local Chinese players, but I would say a shift towards more local new Chinese players that have come to the market sometimes through the battery electric vehicle angle and now that are pushing some other solutions to the marketplace, whether it's plug-in hybrid vehicles or range expander electric vehicles that we are calling REVs. So what we have been doing is that for some time now we've been working with these companies that have come with new brands and new products to the marketplace. And I would say we are starting to get good traction and good success with these new players. And in some regions of the world, we tend to move from ICE to hybrid to battery electric vehicles. It seems that in China we are seeing it moving from battery to plug-in hybrids and range extended vehicles, because I think there is probably a good understanding that you need several solutions in order to satisfy the needs of the consumers. So we are very active. We are seeing a lot of pursuits on these technologies, and we have been developing specific products to address the needs of those platforms. And we keep on being quite active on the vehicle side.

Okay. Are there any customers you can point to where it sounded like you were alluding to some new business that's kicking in in 26 and 27? Did I hear that correctly?

You heard that correctly, and I will not mention names of customers yet. That's usually not the practice we have in the industry. It's confidential with the customers. But I would point at successful and new brands in China.

Okay. Perfect. Sean, two things. First, could you, on the release, you talked about adjusted pre-cash, well, $157 million. Can you define how you are getting there?

Sure. It's a very strong EBITDA performance, but then we did have quite a nice lift from working capital, which had been a huge... No, no, no. I see that.

But how are you defining it? Is it operating cash flow less cap X?

Yes. Sorry. You have a rec table in the back of the deck that lays that out, but in very high-level terms, it's operating cash flow less cap X, and then we exclude repositioning and other one-time charges. But that can all be found on the rec table in the back of the deck. Okay. Okay.

So you

actually... But at a high level, that's what it is.

Okay. So when you look at your 25 outlook, when you're talking about adjusted pre-cash, well, that's what you're alluding to. You're excluding any of the repositioning or the other things that are in there? I see the 157. Okay. So there was factoring in P notes. That was the big number, the $39 million?

Right. And so with that, what we do is when we factor, we don't give ourselves a benefit for that. So if we actually sell receivable, even though it's a true sale, we don't look at that as a free cash flow benefit for that quarter. So it just gets... So we would add it back in and then reverse it out the number four.

Yes. For the year, it's nothing. So, okay. The second thing is on M&A. I never hear you talk about M&A, and I'm just, or I should say rarely. And are there M&A opportunities out there in your segment? Is it something you're just staying away from? Do you feel like you can build it internally just because of the strength on the R&D side? How do you view M&A on the overall capital allocation scheme?

So the way we look at that first, we need to get back to our organic growth strategy. We have an organic growth strategy that we think is very strong. Leveraging the two legs of the company on the one hand, it's the strengthening of the turbo business. The turbo business, we are seeing the world consolidating. We are expanding our portfolio. You've seen the big turbos we are launching on industrial. And then the second leg of the company is the development of the zero emission vehicle solutions with the three that I've explained today. This is where resource and this is the base of our organic growth strategies, recognizing that there are obviously some segments that we want to push more. And it's not it's quite obvious in everything we've said so far that we want to expand further on commercial vehicle on highway, off highway and industrial. So if you put that together, obviously a good M&A strategy should reinforce that organic growth. So like any company, we are active. We are looking. But for the same thing, we have not committed to anything on the M&A side.

And I would just add that we are active, but you don't hear us talk about it that often just because we have a very high bar. We do not want to take an action that will be dilutive to our shareholders. So the bar is quite high. And that's the obvious here in always looking at opportunity.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

This concludes our question and answer session. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.