General Motors Company

Good afternoon, and welcome to the General Motors Company fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. During the opening remarks, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the opening remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. We are asking analysts to please limit yourself to one question and a brief follow-up. To ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 2. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded Tuesday, February 1, 2022. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rocky Gupta, Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Jordan. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as we review GM's financial results for the fourth quarter and calendar year 2021. Our conference call materials were issued earlier this afternoon and are available on the GM Investor Relations website. We are also broadcasting this call via webcast. I'm joined today by GM's Chair and CEO, Mary Barra, GM CFO, Paul Jacobson, GM Financial CEO Dan Burse, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Voigt. Kyle will be available to speak about Cruise's exciting progress in the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin, I would like to direct your attention to the forward-looking statements on the first page of the chart set. The content of our call will be governed by this language. We'll now turn the call over to Mary.

Hey, thanks, Rocky, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Before we get into our 2021 results and 2022 outlook, I want to start with some exciting news from Cruise, which is one of our most significant growth opportunities. Kyle, Dan Kahn, Gil West, and the entire Cruise team are doing great work, and they just delivered a key milestone on the drive to commercialize Cruise rideshare service. As Kyle has shared, Cruise team members have been taking fully driverless rides in San Francisco since November, to demonstrate and refine the software and hardware ecosystem we have created together. In fact, they have logged over 20,000 miles and completed more than 600 trips. I rode in a driverless cruise a couple weeks ago, and I can tell you it was the highlight of my career as an engineer and as the leader of General Motors. The ride is smooth and confident. It's like having an experienced and attentive driver behind the wheel. Now, as CREWS announced this morning, it is inviting members of the public to sign up for their own driverless rides through a wait list on the CREWS website. This is the first truly driverless ride hail service offered to members of the public in a dense urban environment. To maximize its learnings, CREWS will prioritize use cases that are on natural fits for autonomous ride sharing. This major milestone brings Cruise even closer to offering its first paid rides and generating $50 billion in annual revenue by the end of the decade. It also means that the SoftBank Vision Fund will invest, as planned, another $1.35 billion in Cruise. This is another strong vote of confidence in the Cruise team, its technology, and the services it's creating. Additionally, Cruise continues to advance the strong relationship it has established with Walmart where the team is making progress on driverless deliveries of groceries to customers every day. With this incremental investment and the investments from General Motors and companies like Honda, Microsoft, and Walmart, Cruise is very well capitalized to scale its business when the origin production comes online at factory zero late this year. So Kyle, congrats. Now I want to turn to the significant investments we are making to expand both our battery cell and EV assembly capacity. We believe our strategy to scale a common Ultium cell, component set, and platform will create significant long-term value for all GM stakeholders. We also recognize that we need to launch more EVs faster, so that's exactly what we are going to do. As you know, the GMC Hummer EV is already in the market. Cadillac Lyric deliveries begin in less than 60 days, and additional BrightDrop EV600 production begins at CAMI late this year, where we'll launch with an annual capacity of 30,000 units and the ability to nearly double production by mid-decade. The Chevrolet Silverado EV launches next spring, and the Chevrolet Equinox and Blazer EVs will also reach the market in 2023. We have the teams working to accelerate the volume curves for all of these launches and to resume both EV and EUV production as soon as possible. And we have set a target to deliver 400,000 EVs in North America over the course of 2022 and 2023. As you know, we have also announced additional battery cell and assembly capacity investments in Michigan that will give us more than 1 million units of EV capacity in North America by the end of 2025, and this includes 600,000 full-size trucks. This is in addition to more than 1 million units of EV capacity in China over the same timeframe. And I can tell you right now, 1 million units in North America won't be enough to meet the steep inflection in demand that we expect starting mid-decade for our EVs. That's why we will continue to convert ICE capacity to EVs and plan to invest in a third EV truck plant. We are formulating plans for the truck plant right now, and we will share more as we work through the details. Importantly, battery cells will not be a constraint to our long-term EV growth. Our Ultium cell JVs in Ohio and Tennessee come online in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and we will add capacity as demand grows. Our Ohio plant will launch with seven-day operations, adding 10% capacity and 200 jobs. Cell production in Michigan is scheduled to begin in late 2024. And I'm sharing today that we will announce the location of our fourth US cell plant in the first half of this year. Together, these plants will support GM's EV volume growth and supply our customers in the rail, trucking, aerospace, and marine industries. Equally important for our EV strategy for North America is that it is backed by a strong, more sustainable, North American-focused supply chain that includes lithium, rare earth material, permanent magnets, cathode active material, silicon carbide, motor stators, and more. To deliver this acceleration, we are pulling ahead significant investment into the 2022 to 2025 timeframe, and we will share more details as we further refine our plans. Growing customer demand for the first wave of Altium products strongly supports these investments. We already have more than 59,000 reservations for the GMC Hummer EV pickup and SUV. Not surprisingly, some of the first owners are very prominent figures in the sports and entertainment industries, and their initial feedback has been just incredible. They expected a super truck and they got one. Our next electric pickup will be the Chevrolet Silverado EV. More than 110,000 Silverado EVs are reserved so far, including reservations from more than 240 fleet operators, and the numbers keep growing every day. Some of the world's largest fleet customers, including FedEx, Verizon, Merchants Fleet, and Walmart, are adopting BrightDrop vehicles and their technology. All told, we have more than 25,000 production reservations for BrightDrop cargo vans. And customer interest in the Cadillac Lyric is growing so quickly that we'll forego a new round of reservations and began taking customer orders soon after the debut edition launches in March. One of our most highly anticipated reveals this year will be the Chevrolet Equinox EV, which we previewed in January. The Verge named it the best electric car of CES, saying, there's a perception that electric vehicles are luxury items. So when General Motors said the Equinox would come with a $30,000 sticker price, it's something worth noting. The efficiencies created by the Altium platform are a key reason why we will be able to deliver truly affordable EVs like the Equinox. Affordable EVs are part of the market that startups aren't targeting, but they are key to driving mass adoption of EVs, which is a national and a global priority. That's why we plan to follow the Equinox with an even more affordable EV. Now let's shift and talk a little bit about our other GM growth platforms. Throughout the year, you will see the expansion of advanced vehicle technologies, new shopping tools, and continued progress at our new business startups. This spring, we will launch redesigns of the Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra 1500 pickups and offer them with Super Cruise with expanded capabilities that include lane change on demand and hands-free trailering. These are first for the segments. In the same timeframe, GM and our dealers will begin marketing CarBravo, our new used vehicle shopping service. This is truly a win-win. Our dealers will grow their business by offering customers online access to far more inventory than other services. In turn, we expect to drive incremental GM and GM financial revenue by selling products like OnStar Insurance, OnStar Connected Services, accessories, and financial services. It will also help support strong residual values for off-lease vehicles. Then next year, we'll roll out Altify, a new end-to-end software platform for EVs, AVs, and ICE vehicles that will have even more sweeping over-the-air capabilities than we have today. This includes the ability to back-cast features to the Cadillac Lyric. Altify will be the foundation for new GM-developed and approved 30-party apps, in-car subscriptions, and other connected services that enhance the customer experience and expand our revenue through the life of each vehicle. We can and we will keep up our aggressive pace backed by strong results. We expect to follow our record EBIT adjusted earnings in 2021 with another year of record or near record results in 2022, while investing significantly more year over year to accelerate our growth. Paul will share more details on our results and guidance in his remarks. But before I turn the call over to him, I would like to discuss our capital allocation strategy. The prospect of continued strong earnings and free cash flow, even as we invest for growth, naturally raises questions about resuming a common stock dividend. As we move forward, we will consider all opportunities to return excess capital to shareholders, but we will not reinstate a dividend at this time. Our clear priority is to accelerate our EB plan and drive growth. And we want to maintain maximum flexibility to invest as opportunities arise across our growth platforms, including many of the accelerated plans I've outlined today. I think we've consistently demonstrated that we're a team that delivers on our commitments. That's more important now than ever with the incredible opportunities in front of us. So now I'm going to turn the call over to Paul, who will walk us through the quarter and our outlook. Then Paul, Dan Burris, Calvote, and I will take your questions.