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Forvia Se
4/17/2025
Good morning. This is the conference operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Forvia 2025 first quarter sales results conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on the telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Martin Fischer, CEO of Forvia. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah, thank you very much and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I wanted to be with you today to share some opening thoughts and my convictions. Olivier will then present the Q1 sales performance in detail before we will both answer your questions. Let me start by saying that despite a global environment that remains challenging, for we have delivered a very solid sales performance this past quarter. We have accomplished organic growth of 2.1% and an outperformance of 80 basis points, despite a strongly unfavorable geomix. This demonstrates our robust market positioning and the dedication of our entire team. Looking ahead, we'll continue to navigate particularly uncertain times. So it's only natural to ask the important questions. Where's the industry heading? How resilient is for we as a business? What is for we are putting in place to protect its performance? In my longstanding career in this industry, I've already seen a few cycles and a variety of storms as well. And what I'm truly convinced of is the need to remain pragmatic and agile. We need to focus on what's within our control And that's exactly what we're doing these days. Right now, our focus is on three key areas, operational excellence, tariffs, and the balance sheet. And these measures that we are taking are designed to safeguard our business and position us for sustainable success moving forward. So let me first and foremost talk about the operational excellence. I am challenging the organization these days to step up our operational excellence and to conserve all costs across the board that is possible. The attitude is we can always do more. In Q1 specifically, we progressed on our EU Forward initiative, which is designed to enhance the company's long-term competitiveness in the European market. This plan is well on track. New operations represented approximately 1,100 redundancies that we announced, and it is adding to the approximately 2,900 headcount reductions from 2024. With this, our annualized savings target of 300 million is confirmed by the end of 2025. This past quarter for VRN has intensified efficiency efforts at underperforming plants with interiors in North America. As reported before, they have been impacted by several complex production launches in 2024, and I am leading a dedicated task force to turn around this business. Improvements are happening through reinforcing the local leadership, through the strict application of the for-via accident system, and faster scrap reductions. Second important point, the U.S. tariffs. The potential implementation of tariffs has been a longstanding concern for the industry, but we have taken effective steps to address them. To date, we have already mitigated about 50% of the estimated exposure, and we are on track to cover the remaining. The mitigation measures we take include pass-through agreements, the optimization of our supply chain, and negotiations with suppliers. And should need errors be enacted in future, we will deploy exactly the same approach with the same objectives. Together with our customers, we will also make sure to optimize our available plant capacity in the U.S. To anticipate the risks of volume pressure and to overcome potential consequences, we are maximizing flexibility in direct production costs. Also, we are implementing additional fixed cost reductions and we further limit our investments, prioritizing CapEx efficiency. Last but not least, our balance sheet. You have observed in Q1, we have successfully refinanced several of our upcoming maturities, pushing key deadlines out to 2027. This gives us the flexibility and a longer runway to manage our financial obligations. As you know, on top of that, Our liquidity is robust, which is a great asset in today's uncertain environment. So let me conclude this first section with confirming our guidance. All these efficiency measures that we are implementing and the round-the-clock commitment of our teams enable us to safeguard our performance in the current market challenges, and we will achieve our full-year targets. Olivier will come back in the next step on the confirmation of our 2025 guidance in further detail. Olivier, please go ahead.
Thank you, Martin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to briefly give you more colors on our Q1 performance, starting with the revenues. In this respect, we had a good start of the year, as Martin said. We recorded sales of 6.7 billion euros. up 2.6% compared to Q1-24, which came out ahead of our initial forecast. Inside this number, the organic growth, i.e., excluding forex and scope, was up 2.1% in the period. This was driven by seeding, which benefited from acceleration of programs launched in Q1-24, notably in Europe, as well as strong sales development with BYD that recorded a strong production increase in Q1. The electronics business grew at double digits and surpassed volume production in all regions. Its momentum is also reflected in the order intake, as electronics accounted for nearly 40% of the business awards we got in Q1. Interiors recorded light growth being penalized by strong comparables from last year, given the level of tooling cells in the context of the high level of production launches that we had a year ago, as you know. On the other side, clean mobility cells were down 7.4% on an organic basis. The decline was contained in North America and in China and was more pronounced in Europe as activity was penalized by the commercial vehicle segment, as well as the small disposal of first engineering, which was closed in Q2 of 24. Sales in 19 were penalized by the end of production with a major U.S. carmaker in China and in the U.S., while sales were up in Europe. And finally, life cycle solutions continue to be impacted by the underinvestment in segments such as agriculture and construction. On the foreign exchange level, we had a small tailwind in Q1 related to the beginning of the year appreciation of the U.S. dollar and the RAND. As you know, this movement of currency has reversed in the past few weeks. So we can expect under today's exchange rate, in particular for those currencies, that the impact of currencies would be negative for the rest of the year. If I turn now to the perspective in revenues by region on our Q1 sales performance. We recorded organic growth in all regions in Tuan, with one exception in North America, where sales were down mid-single digits, which is related in particular to the level of cooling sales I mentioned, which concerns interior North America, and in particular interior Mexico in the beginning of last year. Europe has a strong start to the year. All divisions except in mobility posted growths. resulting in a significant outperformance of more than 10% versus market. Cities and electronics were particularly dynamic, benefiting from their strong market positioning, and some projects ramped up. Europe was driving the outperformance of 80 basic points that we achieved at group level in Q1, which in fact is quite a good performance considering that the geographical mix that we have was a headwind of more than 400 daily points. In this context, China posted an organic sales growth of 2.6%. Its performance was a mix of strong growth with Chinese OEMs, now representing more than half of the group sales in the country. and continued sales decline with international OEMs that, as you know, are losing market share. Given our customer mix, our sales didn't match the speed of the market in Q1. But considering the pipeline of a dozen of startup productions, mostly with Chinese OEMs, and the acceleration of already launched programs, in particular with Sherry, we confirm our ambition to outperform the market in Q25 most, in fact, concentrating on H2. Finally, on the Asia region, I would like to highlight that we have a double-digit growth in the rest of Asia, i.e., Asia excluding China, which is driven by strong momentum with our Japanese OEM in the electronic field. Now, coming back to the balance sheet and the maturities of our debts that Martin alluded to, you can see on this slide the activities that we had in the period. We have done two refinancing, one in Eurobonds and another one in the U.S. bond market, which improved our debt profile and reflected the market trust in Corvia Signature. Specifically, we issued a total of more than 1.2 billion euros of that in the period. A classic 750 million euro senior note due 2013, which is at 5.47% including the pre-edge arrangement that we had, which was significantly oversubscribed. And our first issuance in the U.S. dollar bond market for 500 million U.S. dollars due also in 2030 with a coupon of 8%, which represents a good diversification of our funding sources for the future and replaced financing that was actually above 8% given what we had before. All those proceeds are used to repay short-term maturities and allow to clearly clear our 26 maturities Let me remind that 25 maturities are, of course, already cleared, and extend our average maturity to 3.4 years on the pro forma basis compared to 3.1 years at the end of 2024. Our next significant maturities are now due in February 2017. As Martin mentioned, we do confirm our 2025 guidance. Yesterday, S&P released its monthly estimate update. It shows a significant correction of the level of production expected for 2025 as a consequence of the U.S. tariffs from 89.5 to 87.9 million vehicles for the year. It means that the global production, which was previously expected to be overall stable, is now expected to decline by 1.7%. Most of this division, of course, is attributable to North America production locations. Considering our regional exposure, the expected cuts as envisaged by S&P, will represent an impact of around a bit over €200 million on our 25 sales. Given the solid start of the year, above initial expectations, and the large and cautious range we took for our annual 25 sales guidance, we confirmed our sales guidance, provided that there is no other major disruption in our key markets. Let me highlight in this context that the guidance has been given and reiterated as constant exchange rates. As for operating margin and net cash flow, Martin explained all the efficiency measures that are being implemented, not only for mitigation of the tariffs, but also for improvement in the performance, in particular in areas that have been underperforming in the past. These measures are designed to calibrate and calibrated to safeguard our 25 performance and show improvement compared to last year. We therefore confirm our objectives, an operating margin between 5.2 and 6% of sales, a net cash flow at least at the level of last year, i.e. at least 655 million euros, an organic damage rating of at least 20 basic points to 1.8 times, or below at the end of this year. Finally, Forvia continues to make progress on the front of disposals and stay fully committed to restore a solid balance sheet and reduce its leverage, i.e., net depth to adjust EBDA ratio to below 1.5 times by the end of this year.
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