Aptiv PLC (APTV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We're going to get started. Okay. I'm absolutely delighted to have representing Aptiv, Kevin Clark, Chairman and CEO and to his left, Joe Massaro, Vice Chairman, Business Operations and Chief Financial Officer. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

So I just wanted to start out any initial messages for an investment community that we wanted to -- I don't know, what you want to talk about.

Well, listen, I think consistent with what we spoke about in the second quarter. Obviously, the industry is going through transitions, and that's having implications from a customer standpoint, without a doubt, whether that's electrification, whether it's software-defined vehicles and ultimately, the rearchitecture of the vehicle. Having said that, we have a very strong view that those trends are going to continue, that the world is headed in that direction in different regions, it will be at different paces. And we're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. And we'd say, from an operational standpoint, we've talked to Adam about it in the past, given a challenging 3 years as it relates to COVID, supply chain disruption, material inflation, all those sorts of items. Those are things that we've digested, and we're out of that, and that's out of our cost structure. So from a business performance standpoint, from a margin profile standpoint, we're very well positioned. And again, the tailwinds associated with software-defined, the tailwinds associated with electrification will continue and will be stronger with certain customers versus others today, we'd characterize kind of our revenue issues is somewhat isolated for 4 principal customers, but outside of those -- that customer group from a revenue standpoint we're doing extremely well.

So I mean the last couple of quarters, earnings have beat consensus. You announced it's really large ASR, 25% of the market cap, stock has still struggled. What is -- I mean, we'll never know where the stock would be without the ASR, but probably lower. As you're engaging with investors, what are they missing, or what's not landing with them, and what needs to change for them to regain confidence in the story?

Yes. Listen, I think there's an element of -- I think it's about revenue, okay? Yes, top line, right? I think there's an element of -- is electrification going away is the path to software-defined going away, is the path towards smart vehicle architecture going away. So it's a bit of a 0 some sort of mentality. And I would say, a lack of recognition that our customers regardless of the challenges that they have, they always need to be introducing new cars with new content that are market relevant. So to the extent we see shifting in programs, but in reality we see new programs come into play. We see new, for example, ADAS opportunities on existing vehicle platforms for OEMs or on platforms that they're launching very near term. So we have incremental opportunity there. If you see a slowdown in electrification, the reality is all the OEMs are working on electrification strategies. Obviously, it's a bigger push in Europe and China. If BEV is a challenge, then it's plug-in hybrids, it's hybrid, it's more content, again, for Aptiv. So I think there's just a general view that things have been pushed out and then nothing happens until those items actually transpire. And the reality is in terms of the opportunities where we play, we have as many or more than what we had a year ago. So I think we talked about in our Q2 earnings call, listen, 1.5 years ago, we had line of sight to 5 or 6 large SCA programs with our OEM customers today sitting here across the various regions, we have 25 that are in front of us. So the path continues. Those will be 2025 bookings opportunities. There'll be 2027 revenue opportunities versus maybe 2026, but that big revenue opportunity was further out than kind of the near term to begin with.

So we got like the big waves, the big secular things look as good or better than ever. Nearer term, there's been a hiccup. So when does that -- when did that align? Let's double-click on that revenue for me then, is 2024 2nd half to soon for that revenue disappointment to start stabilizing. Do we need to wait to '25?

Well, listen, we -- I think we talked about it in our Q2 earnings call, and we're giving full year guide. We've gone to full year guidance as a part of COVID that revenue growth would be basically 4 points over vehicle production, our outlook for vehicle production this year is basically down 3%. So that's sitting here today, that's where we would call the ball, and that's based on what we see in terms of current programs that are launching as well as programs that are in the process of launching. For next year, in Q2 earnings call, we talked about 2025 revenue from a gross -- on a flat vehicle production standpoint, be kind of mid-single digits from an overall growth standpoint. We're not in a position to fine-tune that yet. But again, we feel there's a lot of things that happened this year from a customer mix standpoint that we feel as though will be digested, will be behind us, and you'll see the growth [indiscernible].

I'm not wanting to kind of get into quarters, you know as you know it's not my [Indiscernible] but you have had a big portion of the German auto complex warn including on-demand. And there's been some idiosyncratic issues with also the recalls of BMW as well. Tesla, also a big customer, you don't break it out anymore, I believe, but still, I think most people think at or near a top 5 customer for you.

That's fair.

Just doing what they're doing. So that -- is there any fine-tuning that you want to make here or manage expectations?

If you watch the situation very closely. So I saw the BMW announcement seeing what the German OEMs are talking about, including folks like VW. So that something that we watch very, very closely. When we gave guidance, obviously, we included the impact of vehicle production schedules and then our normal sort of haircutting of vehicle production schedules and then did an incremental overlay associated with okay, what else could go wrong. I think sitting here today, based on where we are and we have visibility too, I think we've captured it.

Our guidance includes back half production down 5%, so lower than the first half. So we've just -- to Kevin's point, I've tried to incorporate as much of what we've known and then some room for the -- a bit of the unknown in the full year update.

Looking to EVs here. Kevin and Joe, are you surprised at how weak EV demand has been and how much it's kind of feared out in the Western world?

I would say less surprised in North America more surprised in Europe, just given government policy, given consumer interest and a more overall green consumer.

So this has been then so under the [indiscernible] product and seeing how these vehicles are developed and what goes into them. What is it about the products? I mean the consumer maybe it's just we just discover, you don't know what the consumer wants until they're presented with something. There's an element of that. But from what you know, and what you're an expert on, is there something about the product, the way it's engineered or the price or what the utility delivers that like do this business just isn't quite there yet.

Yes. Listen, I think you could break it into a couple of categories, right? And North America, a number of vehicle introductions that when you look at really the utility of the vehicle, it was a third or fourth car, right? A pickup truck with a 100-mile battery range for typical Americans. It's not overly functional. And at a price of over $100,000 a unit, that doesn't -- that doesn't work. I think we'd say, in general, it's cost. It's overall cost versus vehicles with internal combustion engines. Infrastructure in certain areas may be some aspect in terms of charging infrastructure. It feels like from a consumer standpoint, we're past the range anxiety other than the -- my example, somebody from Michigan with a pickup truck towing their boat to Northern Michigan and having to stop 4 or 5 times, that doesn't work, but it's really price. So a number of the OEMs are focused on, I would say, 2 things. One, how do they build low-cost electric vehicles that are more relevant or more of an apples-to-apples comparison to a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. And the other is for those that are really focused on how do they reduce CO2 emissions to meet certain targets, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, other alternatives to electrify and get performance on the powertrain.

Your customers have gone to China and continue to go to China, drive the vehicles, see how they are produced, [indiscernible] architecture. They come back to the states or they come back to Munich, and they are like, oh, gosh, they maybe say other things, but I can't use that language anymore at Morgan Stanley. So what -- when you do a teardown...

New policy?

It's a new policy a new policy yes. When you do a teardown of a Chinese electric vehicle, say, from a BYD or Xiaomi, and maybe you have done this. and you compare it to what the Western firms are doing with whether it's German or even Tesla. What are some key differences? And what are some things that are like, wow, this is -- might impress you or don't impress you?

Listen, the cost -- we do teardowns. We have done teardowns. The on-cost from an electrified vehicle architecture can be 20% less than what you see on a comparable Western vehicle. The focus is on how do you simplify architecture. How do you take weight mass out of the architecture, so how do you remove copper, things like that. And again, how do you more -- how do you simplify the overall vehicle architecture so that you can optimize. And the cost differentials are meaningful. And the BYD vehicles are example. They're great vehicles compared to their comparable vehicles that are manufactured in North America or in Europe. So again, I'm not -- I don't have the purview of information that you have and never will. But I think investors felt, and they still feel that electrification was a very, very big content per vehicle tailwind for you.

And that may still be the case Sure. But I think that's been challenged a little bit with this Gen 2, Gen 3 Chinese vehicles of when you do have software defined, which you're also hedging in your business kind of at the DNA level of your business in your SVA that, oh, if you start from scratch and you're really software-led, you can decomplexify the vehicle, and that might actually introduce content headwinds. How do you reconcile that? Is that true? Is that a fair point of tension and anxiety with an active investor and how do you resolve.

I think it's probably a fair assessment. But when you look at the path towards electrification. Let's start with ICE to BEV. ICE to BEV, the content opportunity goes from $800 to roughly $2,400, 3x. ICE to plug-in hybrid, it's 2.5x. ICE to hybrid, it's 2x. So any trend towards electrification, whether it's a new platform optimally designed is very good for us in terms of the revenue opportunity. I would start there. I would start the second item. And when you think about completely rearchitecting the vehicle, that is a big deal for OEMs. It's not a simple thing to go through. But the reality is given our experience in architecture, and I'll start with the simple before I go to the smart vehicle architecture. The real focus has been on how do we provide an optimized solution for customers where and in several cases, we take out 20% to 30% of the mass and weight in the vehicle for European and North American vehicles. So we can provide significant cost savings. And we work with several OEMs who are very focused and maniacal as much about simplification and cost reduction as they are about their innovation. And that's with some of the most innovative OEMs in the world that operate across multiple regions. From an SVA standpoint, that was all about how do you reduce costs. That was all about how do you optimize and reduce costs. And I think Adam, and you made the comment, I think going from a -- for a legacy OEM to make changes to how it designs, develops architects vehicles, that is a big change. It is a big change. It is easier if you start with a clean sheet of paper, but there is certainly a path there. And I think that's reflected in my conversation about 5 to 6 OEMs working on SVA programs that were in our funnel to now close to '25. So they're all headed down that path. And there's no one as uniquely positioned to deliver on -- to deliver those sorts of solutions. Now may it take a year longer than what maybe we hoped, investors hoped or 2 years longer. It's possible, but it's headed there.

Can Western legacy auto companies be successful with EVs without working with China?

I think so. But I think the focus has to be on how do you take out content, how do you take out content in terms of mass and weight, and how do you simplify? And being very, very focused on that. And to do that, you probably need a dedicated team that comes in that is focused on that as much as they're focused on other things.

So an investor who says, China has won, it's a race to the bottom. It's over. They're setting industrial standards. They're now going to scale it. They're going to come in you don't buy that, or is there some...

Yes. Listen, I think I wouldn't be prepared to say for Western OEMs, China, you got to take it off the table. Are Western OEMs challenged in China, yes. And part of it is cultural, part of it is an approach to doing business. Part of it is speed without a doubt, and just part of it is kind of a sense of national pride where consumers are focused and several OEMs are focused. Now there are 100 OEMs in China, you know this more than 100. There's going to be a lot of losers there.

[Indiscernible] winning forces there. So there's one more on China, and then we're going to move around and I'll open it up. But as we see the Chinese market develop where you have the domestic players getting into their stride now. It's putting a lot of pressure on your Western firms there. Kind of remind us the puts and takes of the roughly $4 billion or so of revenue exposure you have in China, kind of help us unpack kind of what it means as Chinese domestic gain share as Chinese EV domestic gain share versus Western, and kind of how you're positioned in both of these buckets, whether that's a positive, negative or an equal [indiscernible].

In China, today, our mix is 50%, just under 60%, 55% with the local OEMs. 45% with the multinationals. That's moved from -- it was close to 80% 3 or 4 years ago. From a bookings standpoint over the last couple of years, we've been booking 60% to 70% of our business in China with the Chinese local OEMs. And a number of those programs, and Adam talked about speed, our programs were literally were awarded business today. And our SOP is in 9 to 12 months now, which for a Western OEM is, Adam knows, it's 3 -- it's typically 3 years, 2 years is fast. So the recycle period is much faster so that mix relative to market, our view is we'll be at market by 2026 from an overall mix standpoint.

Ford, recently, I'm just picking them as an example, announced some charges they're taking on their EV business, including some payments that they're going to be making to suppliers because some people might have gotten screwed. And they want to keep up good relationships because they had their suppliers preparing for product that's just not being made. Do you think they're going to see more of the OEM customers do something like that and kind of walk us through that disruption it might cause to your business?

I think for us, we might see some of that. I think the larger portions of that, and Joe should chime in, we've been impacted during 2024. There were a number of Western OEMs that were very focused on BEV architectures that suppliers like ourselves participated in. There were a number that had very aggressive volume targets that we, as we always do, significantly reduced the amount of investment that we actually put in the ground, which was a difficult negotiation, but proved to be right, but there were some that we are getting recoveries from.

I'd love to move to autonomous and ADAS, if you will. So you've kind of managing out the exposure from Motional, excuse me. Things changed, right? Learning experience, I think those are learnings that you've taken into the other parts of the organization. On the other hand, you see Waymo that's ever expanding in Phoenix and San Francisco, growing that fleet a lot more. A lot of -- there seems to be a hype cycle building around that one. From your perspective, I'm curious how you reconcile like what's your opinion to the audience of when we really see scalable commercializable Level 4 given the Triumphs and tribulations that you've had in your own experience.

It depends on how you define, believe it or not, Level 4, and how you're thinking about ODD. You think know that. For us, the decision on autonomy was really about initially, how do we advance -- how we'll be advancing engineering and bring it into our ADAS business. And [Indiscernible] said and that's what we're doing. The second piece was we pursue additional opportunities from a revenue standpoint. And that was, for example, robotaxis, mobility on demand. What we concluded was getting the cost down mobility on demand to a level where you could have a broad enough ODD, it was tough to make the math work nearer term. right? It was just tougher to do it. We had opportunities like ADAS that we're very focused on. And then a recognition that we had a partner who is very focused on -- came to the same conclusion, but very strong believer that consumer applications of autonomy would occur, and they were fine with it occurring kind of post 2030, which for us, the time frame was quite frankly, too long. We believe in autonomous. We think it's going to happen. Your point on the Waymo vehicles, the performance, what you see on the roads are great. The technology at Motional is fantastic, but it was really the monetization of that. investment nearer term that got in the way.

Yes. No, I'd agree. I think from a learning perspective and from being able to bring in the technology, we've done that. And I think we made a decision with our investment partners around just it becomes a little bit more of an OEM investment as you get out over the next few years versus something a supplier would do.

So there are many in the robotics and specifically the autonomous vehicle community that say that a large language model on supercompute and data center training, this kind of ChatGPT moment, if you will, really has and will continue to have a profound impact on autonomous vehicle development because you can train these more complex models, much, much faster and photons in, maybe challenges what have made -- would have been the kind of parameters of success 24 or 36 months ago. Mobileye is in the epicenter of this kind of debate right now? Do you need to spend money on supercompute to train models? Or can you have your heuristics kind of rules-based thing promulgate further. Where do you come out on that? Do you think that -- is it overhyped, and I've been known to do that to be kind of panglossian on things and then apocalyptic on others. But is it panglossian and overly optimistic to say that LLM and ChatGPT type, these type of multimodal models really is putting autonomous vehicle technology on the AI flywheel.

Yes. It's certainly moving things much faster. So the ability to develop, the ability to enhance the line technology to test for edge cases, all those sorts of things, it certainly has accelerated. Our -- it's enabled acceleration, and that's certainly the case at Motional. For us, which I think is going to be your next question, and we've talked about it before. We use ML for our perception systems. We use ML for path planning. We use ML for in-cabin sensor systems, DMS and cabin monitoring. We use ML when you think about customer requirements on large ADAS programs. On the ADAS side for us, it tends to be limited to the radar vision solution that we're working on, the path planning separate, so not the end to end that you're talking about. For us, the rationale there is, we've built an ADAS stack that's open and modular that different parts can be sold to customers, right? So they can choose a vision system or a radar system or a portion of the future stack. They can do their own or another supplier again as an example. So that end-to-end piece that you're talking about, which in our case, we would go from perception system all the way through to the path planning. It's very difficult to separate that once you've done that, right? So it would be much more difficult for us to sell parts of that to our customers and whether our customers, we have customers that have purchased our full ADAS solution, everything. But we have others who have purchased part of it, and all of them want the feeling of choice, they're not locked in.

Is this creating hesitation with your OEM customers or are some saying like, wait a minute, we thought we had this figured out. Now we're on a different path. We're going to slow -- could it create some slowing down of the wins that you might have, for example, in advanced ADAS BEV as they assess Qualcomm and NVIDIA and others coming at them with different technologies, and then they've been assessing in the Chinese market, some of the local solutions there.

Yes. No. I would say our ADAS, the ADAS opportunities that we have in front of us from a large platform standpoint are more today than what we had a year ago. And part of that is, as we talked about shifting product cycles, existing vehicles that are out on the road or those that are going to be new to launch in a recognition that, hey, ADAS still does sell. It's important to an OEM, but it needs to be market relevant, right? It can't be a 3- or 4-year-old ADAS system. So how do they keep advancing it. So we haven't seen a slowdown from that standpoint. As you know, a number of OEMs use the different levels, very kind of loosely right? There are some from an ADAS standpoint, in China that from a testing and validation standpoint, quite frankly, there will be challenges.

Recently yes, no standards.

Yes, exactly. And so -- but they've moved very [indiscernible] they moved very quickly. They've moved very quickly.

What do you think of Xiaomi on the auto side?

So we have less business with Xiaomi at this point in time. But it looks like they're going to be one of the winners from an OEM standpoint.

Our China team thinks it's the most consequential [Indiscernible]. We have a few minutes left. Any questions from the audience for Kevin or Joe?

Yes. Just a quick question on [indiscernible] wider...

Yes. It's -- again, it's -- we're positioned for it. It's more content, quite frankly, for us relative to the orange cables and connectors.

[Indiscernible].

From a high-voltage standpoint, they're definitely bigger. But again, it's something that we try to optimize with our overall product portfolio.

[Indiscernible].

Exactly higher-performing solutions, but lower weight and mass, yes.

Less copper cable, which is, for us, just basically a pass-through. So any time you see architecture changes where you're putting in higher levels of connection systems, high-speed cable assemblies, different types of materials versus round copper tends to actually be margin accretive for us from an architecture perspective.

Kevin, when you guys were contemplating the ASR launch, the accelerated share repurchase. Walk me through what really triggered that decision because it's a big one. I mean, it's a partial LBO, were you -- was it -- how much of it was just a function of our stock is just really undervalued and cheap versus the things that we would normalize reinvest in and/or the M&A opportunities, which I think you all have an incredible track record on overall and those other opportunities of uses of capital, just relatively weren't as good as they had been.

Yes, I would say it's something, obviously, we spent a lot of time on.

We know a thing or two about capital allocation.

I'd say it was a very big piece of -- we looked at our outlook for the business. We looked at where our stock was trading, and we viewed it as very cheap. And we have a lot of confidence in the overall medium- to longer-term performance of the business. Therefore, are highly confident in stock price appreciation. And you see a near-term dislocation relative to all the things that we talked about, which we fully understand, in terms of opportunities that are out there from an M&A standpoint, they continue to be strong. But the areas where we want to deploy capital from an M&A standpoint, given where our multiple was, it's tough to make that math work, right? That's just being transparent. It's tough to make that math work. So our view was we could buy back a lot of stock. We can deleverage in roughly a 12-month sort of time frame, given the strength of our business and how we're performing. And we're back on track in terms of M&A opportunities and continuing to grow inorganically in the business.

Okay. That's a good place to end. Kevin and Joe, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.