Aptiv PLC

Good day and welcome to the Aptiv Q3 2023 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Jane Wu, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Marjorie. Good morning, and thank you for joining Aptiv's third quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. The press release and related tables, along with the slide presentations, can be found on the investor relations portion of our website at Aptiv.com. Today's review of our financials exclude amortization, restructuring, and other special items, and will address the continuing operations of Aptiv. The reconciliations between gap and non-gap measures for our third quarter financials, as well as our full year 2023 outlook, are included at the back of the slide presentation and the earnings press release. During today's call, we will be providing certain forward-looking information that reflects Aptiv's current view of future financial performance and may be materially different for reasons that we cite in our Form 10-K and other SEC filings. Joining us today will be Kevin Clark, Aptiv's Chairman and CEO, and Joe Massaro, CFO and Senior Vice President of Business Operations. Kevin will provide a strategic update on the business. and Joe will cover the financial results in more detail before we open the call to Q&A. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Kevin Clark.

Thanks, Jane. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. Let's begin on slide three. We delivered another strong quarter, exceeding our expectations despite some headwinds. Touching on a few of the highlights, new business bookings totaled $6.6 billion, bringing the year-to-date total to a record $27 billion. Revenues increased 7% to $5.1 billion, two points over the growth in vehicle production, reflecting double-digit growth in ASUX revenues and S&PS revenue growth in line with global vehicle production. The impact of the UAW strike in North America, as well as customer mix. EBITDA and operating income were both records, totaling $727 million and $560 million, respectively. reflecting solid flow-through on volume growth in ongoing operating performance initiatives, partially offset by unfavorable effects, timing related to customer recoveries, and the impact of the UAW strike. We expect continued sequential margin expansion as headwinds related to supply chain disruptions continue to dissipate, customer recoveries are closed, and the benefits from further cost structure actions take hold. The team remains laser-focused on continuing this trend in the fourth quarter and into 2024 and beyond. Turning to slide four, touching on the key themes and macro trends that have had an impact on our operations this year. Our customer relationships and new business bookings are stronger than ever, driven by robust demand for smart vehicle compute and software, high-voltage electrification, and ADAS solutions. As automotive OEMs continue on the path toward fully electrified, software-defined vehicles, we are their partner of choice, delivering unique, full-system solutions that provide enhanced features and greater flexibility, all at a lower cost. We're also benefiting from the transition to the software-defined future across several other industries, with opportunities in the commercial vehicle, telecom, A&D, and industrial markets. Global automotive vehicle production has been stronger than we initially forecasted, as easing supply chain constraints have led to fewer disruptions, enabling increased production. Our strong year-to-date results had put us well on our way to reach the top end of the full-year guidance we laid out in early August. However, the UAW strike, which affected the production schedules of our top three North American OEM customers, has had an impact on both our third and fourth quarter results. While tentative agreements have been reached with all three North American OEMs, there remains some uncertainty on vehicle build schedules as the OEMs work to finalize their plans to ramp up production during the balance of the fourth quarter. Our operating teams in North America are working closely with our customers and supply chain partners to help accelerate the ramp up of production and minimize any potential disruptions. Moving to slide five, As already mentioned, new business bookings during the quarter were $6.6 billion, bringing our year-to-date total to a record $27 billion, on track for our target of $32 billion for the full year. Advanced safety and user experience bookings totaled $2.2 billion, driven by over $1 billion in active safety awards. Signal and power solutions bookings reached $4.4 billion, including $1.1 billion in bookings for our high-voltage electrification solutions split across geographies, bringing the year-to-date total to $4.3 billion, already surpassing last year's record of $4.2 billion. As OEM strategies around their vehicle architecture platforms evolve, one constant will be the need for solutions that deliver improved performance at a lower cost. And Aptiv is perfectly positioned to leverage our full system capabilities to enable fully electrified, software-defined vehicles. Turning to slide six to review our advanced safety and user experience segments, third quarter highlights. Revenues increased 13%, eight points above vehicle production, the result of a 30% increase in active safety revenues, reflecting strength across all regions as a launch of our level two and level two plus ADAS solutions continue to ramp. Operating income totaled 109 million, reflecting a 7.6% operating margin, an increase over the prior period, but sequentially lower than the second quarter due to the seasonality of Wind River revenues and the timing of customer recoveries. New business bookings totaled $2.2 billion and included $1.2 billion of active safety customer awards, including a major award with a large German truck manufacturer, underscoring the strength of our high-performance radar technologies and their applications outside of the automotive industry. As demand continues to increase for more advanced active safety solutions, our unique insights and proven domain expertise position Aptiv to deliver differentiated value to our customers. To that end, we're excited to have recently launched our automated parking solution, an additional feature to our AI ML enhanced Gen 6 ADAS platform to address complex parking scenarios. Aptiv's unique solution enables fully modularized automated parking features that scale from level two to level four, from auto parking assist and memory parking all the way to auto park delay. Automated parking is just one of the many features that we have under development in our Gen 6 8S technology roadmap, which will scale to a full level 3 8S platform in 2026. Turning to the signal and power solution segment on slide seven. Third quarter revenues increased 5% in line with global vehicle production. high voltage revenues increased 13%, reflecting strong growth across all product lines, partially offset by customer mix in Europe and Asia, and the impact of the UAW strike in North America. The $4.4 billion in SPS bookings that I mentioned previously included a low voltage architecture award with a Chinese OEM, demonstrating the progress we're making further penetrating the local Chinese OEMs. Another strong quarter for InterCable Automotive with $400 million in new business awards, including a major award with a global customer in North America reflecting continued strong commercial traction, and a high-voltage system award with a European OEM that includes products across our electrical distribution, connection systems, and inter-cable automotive portfolios, demonstrating how our full system approach sets us apart from the competition. Lastly, we're proud to announce that Aptiv has once again been recognized as an Automotive Pace Award finalist. A rapid power reserve solution is a groundbreaking technology that provides a highly reliable, redundant power source for a variety of critical functions, eliminating the need for a low-voltage battery in the vehicle, significantly reducing weight, mass, and cost. This recognition validates Aptiv's industry-leading technology, as well as the value and impact our continuous innovation provides our customers. Turning to slide eight, we're excited to showcase many of our new innovations at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January next year. We'll bring our vision of the future to reality, including vehicles with active smart vehicle architecture, running applications for next-generation ADAS and in-cabin user experience. Vehicles with our complete portfolio of optimized electrical vehicle solutions purpose-built for demanding power requirements and Wind River's edge-to-cloud platforms, supporting the latest safe, green, and connected applications from Aptiv. We'll be providing live demonstrations of how we're leveraging our deep insights into the brain and nervous system of the vehicle, along with Wind River's proven software technology to develop optimized and scalable solutions that meet OEM needs for performance, flexibility, and lower costs. Moving to slide nine, in recognition of our strong commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and sustainability, Aptiv was recently named by Newsweek as one of America's greenest companies. At Aptiv, our business strategy is directly aligned with our sustainability goals. We provide solutions of the highest quality, designed, developed, and manufactured responsibly, that enable a safer, greener, and more connected world. In doing so, we take care of our people and our communities while minimizing our carbon footprint. Sustainability is an enterprise-wide commitment, and I'm proud of our entire team for helping us to achieve our goals and ensuring that our company, our customers, and our planet continue to thrive. Moving to slide 10. Before I turn the call over to Joe to walk through the financials, I wanted to touch on our current view of 2024. Building on the solid foundation we've established in 2023, we're well positioned for continued strong revenue growth and margin expansion despite the macro headwinds. Our safe, green, and connected product portfolio is perfectly aligned to the demand for feature-rich electric vehicles, as well as the acceleration of the software-defined future in adjacent markets. Our advanced technologies and capabilities will continue to drive strong performance across multiple industries. While some macro uncertainties remain, we're confident in our ability to execute flawlessly in a dynamic environment. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Joe to go through the numbers in more detail.

Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. Starting on slide 11, as Kevin highlighted, Aptiv reported another quarter of strong financial results, exceeding our expectations despite the impact of the UAW strike in North America. Revenue was up 7% to $5.1 billion, or 2% above underlying vehicle production, excluding the impact of acquisitions. As I will discuss shortly, our growth over market was negatively impacted by the UAW strike in North America, as well as customer mix and program timing in Europe and China. Active safety and high-voltage electrification reported strong double-digit growth of 30% and 13% respectively, and the UAW strike had a negative impact on revenue in the quarter of approximately $80 million. Adjusted EBITDA and operating income were $727 million and $560 million respectively, reflecting strong flow-through on increased volumes, continued progress on our ongoing performance initiatives, including reductions in supply chain disruption costs that more than offset higher labor costs. The UAW strike had a negative impact of approximately $30 million, and foreign exchange was a headwind versus last year. Earnings per share in the quarter were $1.30, an increase of two cents from the prior year, primarily driven by the higher operating income, partially offset by higher interest expense. Operating cash was $746 million, a significant increase over prior year, primarily driven by higher earnings and improved working capital levels. Capital expenditures were flat to prior year at $212 million. Looking at revenue in more detail on slide 12, revenue in the third quarter was $5.1 billion, reflecting sales growth of $299 million, representing adjusted growth of 7%. The Wind River and InterCable acquisitions added $153 million of revenue, and net price and commodities, as well as foreign exchange, were slightly positive in the quarter. From a regional perspective, North America revenues was up 10%, reflecting two points of growth over market, as the UAW strike negatively impacted D3 customer volumes relative to overall North American vehicle production in the quarter. In Europe, revenue grew 10% or four points above underlying vehicle production, driven by strong growth and active safety, partially offset by program timing and slowing growth for certain VEV platforms. In China, revenue was in line with underlying vehicle production due to our customer mix and slowing VEV growth. As noted earlier, despite the lower growth over market, our Q3 adjusted growth and revenue were in line with our expectations. The lower growth over market in North America is consistent with the strike impact we experienced in 2019. And as we have said in the past, growth over market will be lumpy given customer mix and program timing. Moving to the ASUX segment on the next slide. Revenue rose 13% in the quarter or eight points over vehicle production. The outperformance was driven by strength and active safety, where revenue was up 30%. User experience was down 5% in the quarter, reflecting the timing of certain customer programs and a more difficult year-over-year comparison. Price downs in the quarter were less than 1%. Segment adjusted operating income was $109 million, up 35% when compared to the same period last year. Year-over-year ASUX margins in the quarter were negatively impacted by the timing of certain material inflation recoveries from customers, which partially offset the flow-through on incremental volumes and improved performance. Also, ASUX margins will lower on a sequential basis versus Q2 2023 due to expected seasonality in Wind River's Q3 results. We had noted this seasonality at the start of the year. The Q3 impact of the UAW strike on ASUX was relatively minimal, reflecting approximately $10 million of revenue and $5 million of operating income. Turning the signal and power on slide 14. Performance in the quarter was strong, despite a challenging operating environment. Revenue in the quarter was $3.7 billion, an increase of 5%, in line with vehicle production, despite a negative strike impact of approximately $70 million of revenue, or two points of growth. High voltage electrification grew 13% in the quarter, reflecting a slowdown in growth rate from prior quarters. Despite the slowing of EV production, we continue to expect our high voltage business to have a strong double-digit growth in 2023. Price downs in the quarter were less than 1%. Segment adjusted operating income was $451 million in the quarter, up 2% from prior year, including a $25 million negative strike impact. Operating performance, including lower supply chain disruption costs, were positive in the and offset the negative impact of higher labor costs. Customer recoveries offset material inflation and the negative commodity impact in the quarter, while foreign exchange, primarily the peso and RMB, continue to present a headwind on a year-over-year basis. However, the FX impact is in line with the updated guidance we provided in August. Adjusting for the impact of FX and the strike, adjusted EBIT margins for signal and power solutions were 13.3% in the quarter. Moving to cash generation and the strength of ACTA's balance sheet on slide 15. As we have discussed in the past, our focus on cash flow generation and cash conversion is as disciplined as our operational improvement efforts. The past quarter was a clear example of that as we saw the results of our efforts to reduce the higher working capital levels we maintained during the recent supply chain disruptions. Despite the operating challenges in North America, we were able to improve operating cash flow by over $300 million versus prior year, resulting in cash flow conversion of 200% in the quarter and an ending cash balance of $1.8 billion. Given this strong performance, in October, we opportunistically paid down our $300 million term loan, APTA's most expensive borrowing, increasing our average tenor from 15 to 16 years. As we have discussed in the past, our sustainable business model is enabling us to convert more income to cash, and we believe there is no shortage of attractive deployment opportunities as we continue to maintain a well-balanced approach to capital allocation, including prioritizing organic investment of the business to support our portfolio of advanced technologies and record new business awards, executing our M&A strategy by focusing on transactions that enhance our scalability, accelerate our speed to market with relevant technologies, and access new markets, maintaining our current financial policy as it relates to our leverage profile, and opportunistically returning cash to shareholders. I will wrap up with our full year outlook on slide 16. Given our continued strong performance and a higher outlook for global vehicle production, we are maintaining our four-year outlook for 2023, despite the impact of the North American strike. Key assumptions now underpinning our outlook include global vehicle production up 6% plus for the year versus a prior estimate of 4%, driven by higher expected production levels in Europe and China. No significant strike impact beyond October 2023. During the month of October, we experienced a negative strike impact of $100 million in revenue, and $50 million in operating income. Our outlook assumes a restart of customer production and a return to pre-strike production levels over the coming couple of weeks, and no further meaningful disruptions. Accordingly, we expect revenue in the range of $19.95 billion to $20.25 billion, including the impact of total lost strike revenue of $180 million. I would note that while our revenue and adjusted growth rate remain unchanged, given the Q4 strike impact, we are forecasting our growth over market for 2023 to be below our long-term forecast range of 8% to 10%. EBITDA and operating income are still expected to be approximately $2.8 billion and $2.1 billion at the midpoints respectively, including total loss strike earnings of $80 million. No change to adjusted earnings per share of $4.75 at the midpoint, and operating cash flow of approximately $2 billion. As Kevin will discuss further in his closing remarks, despite the macro challenges of the North American strike and the significant foreign exchange headwinds, our relentless focus on improving operating performance and cash flow generation has allowed us to continue to deliver in a difficult operating environment. With that, I'll hand the call back to Kevin for his closing remarks.

Thanks, Joe. I'll wrap up on slide 17 before we open the line for questions. As Joe and I have discussed, we experienced strong underlying business performance in the third quarter, driven by further easing of supply chain constraints, which partially offset lingering headwinds related to material and labor inflation, unfavorable FX rates, and the UAW strike in North America. We continue to see tremendous momentum in new business awards and are well on our way to reaching our bookings target of roughly $32 billion by year end. While our teams continue to work tirelessly to mitigate the impact of the UAW strike in North America, including the ramp up of North American production, we're executing on further cost structure actions to enhance our operational resiliency. Our portfolio of advanced technologies and strong operating execution gives us confidence in our ability to further strengthen our competitive position, and delivers sustainable value creation for our shareholders. Operator, let's now open the line for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Clark. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypads. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. And again, that is star 1. While we build that queue, we'll take our first question from Joe Spack from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thanks, everyone. Good morning. Kevin, Joe, just first on the growth over market for the quarter and I guess the outlook. I know you said it was in part driven by the UAW strike. I think it went from 9% to 5%. But that $180 million is like one point. I think, year over year. And part of that's obviously just the industry, not just your sort of growth over market. So can you sort of detail some of the other factors that are driving some of the lower growth over market for the year and in the fourth quarter?

Yeah. Yeah, Joe, that's a good question. So you're right. You're right. There is the sort of numerator effect of what we're doing. The bigger impact is the denominator, right? That's a calculation sort of that comes in after the fact relative to everything else that happened in the markets. So not only do we have the slowing of the D3, where we do have about 65% of our North American business, but you have folks like the Japanese manufacturers that we don't have a lot of content on in North America. going up significantly. So you get the compounding effect of numerator coming down to the denominator going up. For instance, just the growth in the Japanese OEMs had a very strong Q3. That impact was about four and a half, five points against our growth over market calc. One of the things we look at to double check this math is sort of how did we do against the D3 standalone, where we were up about 14% with the D3 relative to their production. So definitely feel like, particularly in North America, it's more of a market mix at the moment. I did caution on full year because we've got to see how quickly that sort of unwinds. The other places to look at, if you looked at Europe and China, I mentioned just high voltage is growing more slowly. That was probably worth about a point of growth to us on a growth over market basis. It's still contributing to growth over market, but less than prior quarters by about a point. And then some program mix, particularly in Europe, just infotainments down a bit in the quarter. That's some program timing. We expect infotainment to finish the year mid-single-digit growth. So, again, it was more of a you know, a quarterly impact. But you are right. The relative market component of that drives that growth over market calculation as well.

Okay. And then I guess just to follow up as we think about, you know, some of your, you know, midterm targets and, you know, you pointed out some of the slowing BEV penetration in U.S. and Europe. And I think this has been pretty well documented right now. Does that at all? I know you've taken a more conservative view of penetration, maybe then some third parties over the mid to long term. So is this how does sort of the more recent trends, I guess, compare versus, you know, what you laid out back in the February annals day?

Yeah, Joe, it's Kevin. Listen, I think as Joe highlighted, walk through the numbers. You know, Q3 has a lot of unique circumstances in it as it relates to growth over market. And as we look at, you know, providing a perspective on, you know, more precise perspective on our growth over market in the out years, we need to see how Q3 settles. Having said that, you know, we still strongly believe we're very well positioned as it You know, electrification and ADAS solutions are two of our higher growth areas, which we believe will continue to be high growth. Understand the questions in and around high voltage electrification and future growth rates. Certainly Q3 was down relative to Q2 and Q1 this year. I think we would say that is largely related or a significant portion of that impact to is the strike issue and some of the other items that Joe talked about. And then as you highlighted, just a reminder, you know, as we developed our electrification strategy, we very much focused on a select group of customers and had a much more conservative view on the overall market of electrification and the patient penetration. So long-winded way of saying it's too early to answer your question more precisely, but But certainly to say we feel very, very good about where we sit from a growth over market standpoint.

Thanks. I'll pass it on.

Thank you very much. Next, we'll go to Rod Lash with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. Just following up on Joe's question, I know you've been a lot more conservative on high voltage and BEVs than just about everybody. in the market, you had a 35% penetration by, um, by 2030. Um, but can you just give us a little bit of, um, maybe additional color on what your customer mix looks like within that backlog that was propelling the 30% annual growth, just to get a sense of, is it, um, are you more exposed to the companies that are slowing down a bit or are you sort of, um, more dispersed amongst the faster growers?

Yeah, so I'll start, Rod, and Joe can fill in any blanks. So when you look at where the majority of our exposure is, it's with European and the Chinese OEMs. That's where the bulk of our battery electric vehicle exposure is. When we look at kind of nearer term and where we have those exposures are by and large on platforms that are BEV platforms, so they're dedicated BEV platforms. When we look out into the fourth quarter and into early next year, we're seeing very stable schedules as it relates to production and There's one exception with a North American OEM who I think has been pretty public about their plan for electrification. So that will have some impact nearer term. But, you know, offsetting that are a number of OEMs who are in the midst of launching BEV programs that we're on.

So high level, Kevin, when you look at this in its totality, do you feel like there's a material change to that original 30% that you were looking at? Or is it, I guess our question is not that specific, but how are you kind of viewing that?

Yeah, listen, no, it's great. Yeah, we feel really good about it. I think there's an element of I don't think we ever guided 30% forever. So there's a law of large numbers, right, that we need to keep in mind. We'll do just under $2 billion of high-voltage electrification revenues this year, I think $1.8 billion or $1.9 billion. So that business has grown significantly. Q3 obviously was impacted by some of the dynamics that Joe talked about. without a doubt. We will see some impact in Q4 and early next year related to the OEM that I referenced, who is reducing BEV schedules. On the flip side, we have a number of OEMs where we look at current production schedules, what they have in place for Q4 and early next year, where those schedules remain strong. And then in addition to that, we have a number of of programs that are coming online during 2024. And the bulk of that activity is in China and is in Europe, two areas where, you know, we don't view any easing on CO2 emission regulations and, you know, customers really focused on how do they continue to launch new best platforms.

Thanks for that. And just lastly, obviously a lot of controversy around autonomous right now with crews slowing down. I was hoping you can give us any updated thoughts on your investment plans there with Motional, whether that's influencing your thinking on that business at all. And then if Joe could just update us, you originally had like a $1.7 billion performance and lower supply disruption rate. kind of element to your 2022 to 2025 bridge. How much of that are you seeing this year?

Yeah, so I'll start. So nothing new to report out. We're actively engaged with our partner, Hyundai, in terms of future funding as it relates to emotional. As we said in the past, they're on track from a tech standpoint and commercial standpoint. But we're engaged in discussions at this point in time, certainly well aware of what we're reading about and what we're seeing in the market. Those are certainly things that we'll consider as we make our ultimate decision. Again, if we were to fund, we would fund half of their cash needs. We haven't determined our plan or finalized our plan at this point in time. We'll be in a position to report that out when we announce earnings in February of next year.

Hey, Ron, it's Joe. Just to answer your question, I think we're tracking well. If you recall, we had that on that walk I think you're referring to in the investor day from the end of 22 to 25. We had $1.7 billion of performance that was going to work to offset $900 million of labor inflation. We talked about that being fairly ratable over the three years. That wasn't sort of a 2025 thing. We were going to make progress on that through the year. I'd say 23 is tracking very much to that sort of ratable approach on both the cost side as well as the performance, the price recovery side. So things are tracking well. You know, obviously as we sit here today and, you know, it's sort of stated obviously within the comments I made, right, we do have some higher volumes helping offset the strike impact, right? But for the most part, those performance initiatives are coming through as planned, and we're seeing that particularly on the opposite of the labor expense.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we'll go to John Murphy with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. I have another follow-up on this toggle on EVs and the penetration rate maybe being a little slower than people had expected. Kevin and Joe, as you look at this, You know, an optimist could say, hey, listen, you know, EVs are taking a little bit longer and we're going to run our programs as they exist right now, get better margins and returns in the interim, generate more cash and be able to fund the future more robustly. Might make, you know, gross over market a little bit, but our earnings and cash flow might be a bit better. You know, is that potentially, you know, true here? And as you're making these capital commitments to these programs, do you have the ability to kind of toggle down reasonably quickly so it wouldn't dent your returns and you get that benefit of maybe a slower roll?

Yeah. It's a great question, John, and I'll start. Listen, we still are believers in electrification and just – I want to remind everybody in the second quarter of this year, our high voltage revenue growth on a year-over-year basis was 48%, and this quarter it was 13%. And on a go-forward basis, we think it more normalizes relative to where we were in the third quarter. Having said that, you know, as we stated, we've been very focused on having an EV strategy that focuses on principally Europe and Asia Pacific, China, principally OEMs that have built BEV platforms, those OEMs who are taking global platforms from one region to another region and focusing our investment in those areas, which in reality allows us to scale. That was one of our objectives, John, is to make sure that to the extent we're putting in capital, that it scales, that we get significant revenue. On the bulk of those programs, we have scaling price relative to volume. So to the extent an OEM does not achieve their particular targets, we have the ability to adjust prices, and that's contractual. So we've protected ourselves that way. And then to the point you made, our baseline outlook has never been that 50% of the vehicles manufactured in 2030 were going to be battery electric vehicles. We had a much lower outlook. So we think we have it ring-fenced and balanced. Listen, there may be a couple quarters where I mentioned there's one OEM who is backing off their original schedules where we'll see an impact on our growth rate. But as things normalize, you know, we're still optimistic about our competitive position here and the growth opportunity and the margin opportunity it presents.

Yeah, John, it's Joe. The only thing I'd add to, and we've talked about this, you know, for a while, right, particularly with the electrical architecture business, you know, we were able to leverage existing facilities, existing equipment, existing supply chain, existing engineers, low voltage, high voltage, the products are different, but they're very complementary. So, you know, for us, and we've got obviously a very large architecture business. So, you know, I think leveraging that over the last couple of years has helped, you know, that product line get to, you know, segment accretive margins very quickly. But it's also helped from a return perspective, right? Because we had a lot of that capital and plant and equipment in the ground.

Super helpful. Just one follow-up on the Wind River seasonality, because it did seem to We may have missed this in the quarter in our model and our estimates. Could you just, Joe, just kind of run through what you think about seasonality for Wind River? I know you talked about it earlier in the year, but just if you could remind us.

Yeah, I mentioned it in passing in the guide. They are, and it's been there, it's in their business. I think it's somewhat of a software business phenomenon. Q3 is just a very slow quarter for them. Q2, Q4 tend to be the highest quarter. It's a highly leveraged model like a software business would be, right? So software renewals, licenses, new licenses tend to drop it. You know, it's an 80% gross margin business, so they tend to drop at pretty high incremental rates. So we had seen this. We had seen this in the prior years. That's why we cautioned in February. And, you know, we're not surprised by this. So I think as you look at this and we talk about, you know, just you know, the quarterly progression over the next couple of years. I think this will be something that we see as recurring.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you very much. Thanks.

Thank you. We'll next go to Adam Jonas with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks, guys. So just look and follow up to Joe's and Rod's and Murph's question. I want to hit on this theme as well. This EV journey for legacy OEMs has just been an unmitigated disaster so far. I don't think you need to be pragmatic Bostonians to see through that with respect to the inability to generate anything close to a reasonable return on capital, and I don't see a path to it. So just speaking for myself here, guys, but it wouldn't surprise me, and I suppose a lot of people on this call, if GM Ford and the Germans pulled back their EV spending a lot. I mean a lot. And I know you're not in a position to answer the exact impact yet, so I'll phrase the question this way. If they did, If in a world where the undisputed leader, Tesla, is dialing back and barely profitable themselves, and others follow and really just reset because they can't sell negative 100% margins forever, can you tell us how much the 14.5% mid-decade operating margin target or the over 17% longer-term target, and I realize it won't be a straight path there, but how much of those targets really depend on the pace of EV adoption and to continue the way you outlined, even conservatively outlined, on February 14th?

Yeah, I'll take a – I'll start, Adam. Listen, I – we can take a look at a scenario like that, just kind of peeling it back. You know, this year we'll do $1.8 billion in – in high voltage or EV revenues out of our roughly $21 billion in revenues. And clearly the growth rate that we've attached to high voltage electrification is higher than our overall average growth rate. So certainly it would have some impact there. I think as we've said, a lot of these EVs are replacing vehicles with internal combustion engines, most of which, most of those OEMs, where we actually have the vehicle architecture content. So the tradeoff isn't dollar for dollar. The high voltage content or margins related to the SP and F base margins is accretive by a couple points from a margin rate standpoint, but it's not a matter where it's 2x. So it's something that, you know, I think we would manage through. It would have an impact from a profit standpoint. I don't think it would have a huge impact, just given what the margins look like. And we would be going, again, if these OEMs aren't achieving their targets, their prices are going up exponentially. To the extent they're significantly reducing, there are one-time payments from the OEM as it relates to us reducing our capacity to produce the product. So that's how I think about it.

Yeah, I might agree with that. Assuming, you know, unit production, total unit production stays in line, right? It would be swapping back to... Content on the low-voltage platforms, we've got, you know, content on one out of every three and a half vehicles manufactured. And to Kevin's point, you're looking at, you know, a point or two of sort of accretive high voltage that we'd have to work through. But, you know, there are going to be dollars that replace that, assuming the world continues to build the total number. Yeah.

And, Adam, aside, I kind of – I understand your question, and it's a fair one. It's a good one. Yeah. I do wrestle with the industrial policies, and they can always change, of Europe principally, maybe U.S. secondarily, and that can change. China, from an environmental standpoint, but from a national security standpoint, technology standpoint, the push for EVs and the impact on OEM profitability, there's a question I would ask or a scenario that I would throw out where that the OEMs are going to be going to the governments wherever they are for support to continue the rollout so that they can achieve the industrial policies that those particular governments have, right? Because all of this is tied to CO2 emission targets or national security. And if OEMs are uncomfortable or if the investment required is beyond which they can absorb and be profitable ultimately, I think they're going to look for some support not too different from the semiconductor industry in the U.S. and Europe.

Appreciate that, Kevin and Joe. Just one quick follow-up, if I may. Just want to confirm that out of the $1.8 billion or almost $2 billion of high-voltage – sorry, electric portion of the – Was it $2 billion? Sorry. Of the $2 billion number that you quoted. So, Adam, 1.8. I used round numbers. Thank you. Just want to confirm that. Tesla is the single largest component of that. Want to confirm that. And then labor. Remind us how much of your sales is labor and what rate of inflation you're seeing in real time. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, on the customer piece, listen, we can't talk about – speak about – going to respond to. As it relates to labor, I think I would focus on labor within the overall business, Joe.

Yeah, we've talked about it, Adam. We had in the investor day $900 million increase. It was evenly split over the three years. That was about 10% to 11% increase, and that's what we're seeing. Thanks a lot. Yep.

Thank you. Next, we'll go to Chris McNally from Evercore. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much, team. Maybe we could just do a little housekeeping. Kevin and Joe, maybe I'm missing something, but the $1.8 billion in high voltage, what's the number you're using for 22? Maybe it's been restated, but I think you had $1.2 billion in some of your old slides. Could you just update those to 22 and 23? Yep, that's accurate. Okay, so it's going to be $1.2 billion. Okay. And so, so that's actually an, is that an increase? I mean, cause I think the previous number guided to on Q2 was maybe a 30% increase. So it looks more like a 50% increase for, for high voltage for this year.

Chris, it depends on what you're doing with intercable, right? We closed intercable end of last year. So wasn't in last year, call that a little North of 200 million of revenue. So just thought if you pro-forward for it, yeah, it's growing. Yes. And if you didn't, you got to let go of that entertainment problem.

Yep. That's exactly. Okay. Thank you, Joe. Intercapable was exactly what I was asking for. Yep. And the second one, just to follow up on Adam's, forget about talking about the customer, but the 1.8 is only high voltage, right? So if there was a large EV player that you mostly did low voltage for, that low voltage revenue, even though it goes to an EV, would not be in the 1.8 billion. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. We talked about that. We really wanted to focus on just the high voltage product line, and that's when we started providing that guidance a few years back. So that's just high voltage. And the low voltage is, you know, it's going in either vehicle, right? So you don't really see a big difference.

Absolutely. And then the last one for Q4, because obviously there's a lot of moving currents in Q3. On ASUX, I think you talked about 8% to 9% rough margin for the year. It sounds like from the commentary, some of the recoveries were pushed from Q3 to Q4. The first, is that 8% to 9% still pretty good, even if it's the low end? Because it points to a nice material pickup in the ASUX. And I think we've been sort of, you know, looking for that because that's a large portion of the drive towards the 2025 goals. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Full year, the current guide would have ASUX at 8 and SPS at 11.6.

Perfect. Three for three. Really appreciate it, team. Thanks. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. Next we'll go to Itay Misheli from Citi. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just a couple thoughts for me. First, going back to the Q4 margin outlook, I was hoping you could just kind of dimension the seasonality factors in there. Looks like you'll be exiting closer to 13% X strikes. Just kind of curious how to think about it. the baseline as we look to bridge into 2024. And then second question, just hoping to talk more about the ADAS wins you had in Q3, maybe content per vehicle, and also any updated discussions with customers for Gen 6.

Yeah, Etan, I think as you look at, you know, and we'll obviously stay away from 2024 at this point, but I think if you looked at I'd sort of give our standard cautions, right? I'd focus more on H2 versus Q4 because Q4 can be heavy with things like engineering recovery. So I think it's more H2 adjusted for strike. But listen, as you just go through the progression here, and as I mentioned to Rod, we clearly have got the benefit of some volume increases offsetting strike. But our margin rates at the segments... as well as total coal or total company are tracking to the original guide, and that's tracking to that investor day model. And as I mentioned to Rod, you know, the $1.7 billion of performance, the $900 million of labor are falling in. So, you know, if you go – so I think we're on track. If you're going to start to look at back half, I think H2 is a better proxy than just Q4, and then you obviously have to adjust to the strike.

On conversations with customers about Gen 6 ADAS platform, I would say we're in active dialogue with roughly a dozen Asian, European, and North American. So interaction there and strategic dialogue is very, very strong, going very well. As it relates to the Q3 bookings, the bulk of those bookings We're in and around radar solutions that are being plugged into existing ADAS platforms with OEMs in Europe and in China.

Perfect. That's all very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, we'll go to Emmanuel Rosner. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. I was hoping you can help us frame and quantify the exposure to ADAS. electric vehicles, either in terms of, you know, current revenue or more importantly, actually, in terms of, you know, future growth of a market or percentage of backlog, not just within high voltage, but, you know, generally speaking, because to your earlier point, you're selling low voltage components to like, you know, very, you know, very large EV manufacturer. And obviously a lot of the new programs over the next few years would probably have been on your EV platform. So any way to maybe quantify when you sort of like look at this outgrowth expected over the next few years, how much of that would have landed on EV platform?

Yeah, Emmanuel, it's Joe. Listen, I think Kevin framed sort of how we're thinking about long-term, right? We were conservative. I think we didn't sort of follow everybody down the path that, you know, it was going to be 50% in the next couple of years. So, From what we see now, remain confident in that outlook. We do expect growth to slow. We just get to the law of larger numbers. You get almost a $2 billion business. You're going to see growth rates slow over time. As I mentioned earlier, if you look just over the past, call it eight-plus quarters, High voltage has typically provided two points of growth over market, round numbers, a little bit higher in certain quarters, up to two and a half, three. But on average, too, this quarter, it provided a point of growth over market. So meaningful, but certainly not all of it. And then, you know, 80% of the business at this point, including revenue and bookings, is with the European and the Chinese OEMs. So, you know, we had not historically gone down the path of, you know, the North American products, at least the initial products, I think were very niche-y, right? They were the high-end SUVs, sort of more the unique type vehicles. We have some content on them, but they were by no means the bulk of the business. So I think that should help frame it at this point.

I appreciate it. Joe, the reason I'm asking for EV exposure outside of high voltage is there's a large seating supplier, you know, that would be ideally the most power-trained agnostic product you could possibly sell, you know, slashing their backlog by 20% because all these new seats were going to go on new EV platforms, basically, which are either being pushed out or at sort of like lower volumes.

Yeah, I can't speak to the seeding business. Obviously, like I said, we're 80% European and Chinese concentration. I'm not sure who you're talking about or what their portfolio looks like. No, no.

My comment was EV exposure outside of high voltage. Any way to frame that?

No, I think we've provided what we're going to provide, Emmanuel.

Yeah, Emmanuel, from our perspective, vehicle architecture, just given the fact that we're on one of every three vehicles globally, if they're not building a BEV, they're building a vehicle with an internal combustion engine, and more likely than not, we're on that vehicle. So with that low voltage vehicle architecture. So for us, I would say there's virtually no impact.

That's helpful. My follow-up is on, I think you were mentioning your mix impact as sort of like a little bit of a headwind in the quarter outside of just the strike, obviously, in North America. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on the other region? Was it sort of like a customer mix specifically and which region?

Yeah, it was customer mix across really all regions, and some examples were kind of outsized growth of the Japanese OEMs across North America, across Europe, as well as some significant growth in parts of Eastern Europe that are either products manufactured in Eastern Europe or in places like China that are exported. So areas where we have less customer exposure. So a lot of that we think is related to... semiconductor rebound and availability of chips for select OEMs. And the other piece is the impact of or the opportunity as it relates to the UAW strike in North America for select OEMs to potentially gain share.

Great. Thank you for the call.

Thank you. And we'll go to our last question from Dan Levy from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for squeezing in. Wanted to start with your slide 10, just the perspectives on 2024 here. And the bottom half of the slide says continued inflationary environment, geopolitical uncertainty. Maybe you could just unpack the inflationary comment a bit. What is it that you're seeing that's incrementally worse? How does potential recovery on semiconductor costs factor in? And maybe you could just talk about the potential for better stability in production schedules to be a potential tailwind next year.

Yeah, so it's Kevin. Listen, as it relates to stability in production schedules, we're seeing that now. I mean, there's some element of disruption in COVID that remains, but we've seen a significant improvement throughout the year. would expect availability to continue, obviously, into 2024, so should see some benefit there. Material inflation was significant in 2023. We expect in some areas, including semiconductors, that will remain significant in 2024. We're doing a number of things to address that. One, changing semiconductor partners really across markets all the semi-categories from core semis like SOCs, analog power, PMICs, to peripheral semis. So a lot of work being done by our engineering and sourcing teams, establishing commercial agreements or partnership with the Chinese semiconductor space, which is ramping up capabilities very, very aggressively. we're deep into that and are going to take advantage of that opportunity, both to serve the China market, as well as to bring some of these into the nine China market. So that'll free up lower cost alternatives, uh, uh, for ourselves and our customers as it relates to, uh, customer recoveries. Um, listen, those are always challenging discussions, uh, you know, but, but given where, uh, where we have contracts, given where we are from a financial standpoint, we are passing 100% of those costs on to the customer. Again, it's not a simple discussion. It's not an easy discussion, but that's what the commercial team or how the operating team is operating, and that's something that will continue to the extent they're interested in some of these lower-cost alternatives. There's an opportunity for us to jointly benefit, and we'll put those in front of them. But, you know, as of now, that's kind of the state. So the material inflation is relatively high. And then, you know, we're very focused on labor inflation, you know, in places like Mexico, Eastern Europe, North Africa. So those are areas that we're watching very, very closely. And then last item I should say, it's not related to the specific inflation on material or direct labor. We're very focused on continuing to prune our cost structure. to provide additional room and ultimately additional margin.

Great. Thank you. And then just as a follow-up on EV side, just two quick ones there. Can you just confirm, I know you said you're overweight to the European and Chinese China, we've obviously seen a lot of uptake, especially from BYD. How should we think about the mix impact if we see outsized exposure from the Chinese? And then can you just confirm that on SVA that that is powertrain agnostic?

Yeah, SVA is powertrain agnostic. It makes more sense if an OEM is rethinking and moving to a BEV platform, that is the time to really, it's an easier time to implement and make that architecture change. But it would be, you know, powertrain overall, powertrain agnostic. As it relates to mix of BEV customers, I think it's relatively awash. Margins might be a little bit higher on our China OEM partners, given we tend to do more system solutions there. So are able to kind of connect a broader portion of our overall portfolio, but it wouldn't be significantly different.

Yeah, Dan, just current revenues, and it's changed over the last few years. We're about 60%, 40%. global versus local OEs from a revenue perspective today, you know, that would have been north of 75% global back in the 2018-2019 timeframe. Bookings are running 50-50, so we'd expect, you know, that to increase in favor of the locals and obviously just given what's being made over there, a lot of that's EV.

Yeah, I think actually you look at our revenue mix, I think 2024, it's almost 50-50 from a local multinational.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Clark for any final remarks.

Okay. Thank you, Alfred. Thank you, everyone. We appreciate you taking your time this morning. Please let us know if you have any further questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference. We appreciate your participation. Have a wonderful day.