Adient plc (NYSE:ADNT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Doug Del Grosso: Yeah, What’s happening on the EV front, as you correctly point out, is primarily a North America-related issue. I think maybe to a lesser degree, a European issue, but if you look at where the penetration is at right now, it’s not really having a huge impact on us as a company when we look at our backlog and outlook. Characteristic, what happens with our customers if they pull back on one, they extend a nice platform to offset that. So we still see relatively stable level of production. In China, we’re not seeing any pullback. I think we’ve got eight significant launches scheduled for China. This fiscal year, no indication at all that our customers are pulling back on those launches. So I’d characterize it as a North America issue, and I’d just look at EV penetration rates as they exist today, being relatively small, not hugely disruptive to how we look at our outlook in the region.

Emmanuel Rosner: And I guess the second part of the question around this year’s gross of a market, about one point you’ve been running at one and a half, on average for the last three years. I think your comment in last earnings poll suggested that with this success in China, maybe you could run a little bit above average. This seems to be maybe a little bit less than planned. So can you maybe just discuss the factors in that?

Doug Del Grosso: Well, I think one is — one is there’s a significant FX weight because of the RMB and our China growth. So the growth is still significantly there in China, but you’re seeing a really big FX impact on that. Just a comment, and then two, if you look at what we said last call versus this call, or even for the last year, I think it’s really we’ve said our Europe market will kind of grow at or even slightly below because of planned exits in Europe. That’s still holding. North America is kind of at market. That’s still really where it’s running at and China is significantly outpacing, and we still expect China to significantly outpace. So there’s no, I really don’t see any change from that standpoint, Emmanuel, if you would.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Joe [ph] with UBS. You may ask your question.

UnidentifiedAnalyst: My congratulations to the three of you on the call as well. Maybe just to pick up there, if North America or of America’s is roughly flat, Europe could be down. You have growth in China and then we think about the, some of the detailed EBITDA impacts you talked about, right, the transaction impact in America’s, some of these footprint actions in Europe and China. Maybe just help us understand by region where you still have greater room to drive that business performance because — and maybe a little bit of a color by the regions, because it does seem like at least from a top line perspective and with some of the cost issues you talked about, it almost seems like most of that margin performance has to come out of Asia, unless we’re thinking about that incorrectly.

Doug Del Grosso: Yeah, I’ll start out and then Jerome and Mark can make additional comments. I think first and foremost, what I would point to in America’s and in EMEA is it’s still been a very volatile volume market. And as we pointed to in the past, every time volume stabilizes, that means the overall environment is relatively stable. So we get the benefit of volume. But what we get added to that is business performance, because we can really drive productivity in our plants and get incremental variable margin out of the business. So, when we think about on a go forward basis, if we get to some stabilization in volume in those two regions, there’s added benefit there. With regard to China, I would characterize that as a market that’s clearly developing faster than the other markets relative to our product segment.

If we just look at the content per vehicle that’s being driven in China right now, it’s fairly significant to the point where historically it’s operated at a lower level of content per vehicle. And as we go out, a few years in our planning horizon, we’re seeing with, EV adoption and the way Chinese automakers are contenting their vehicle from an interior standpoint, we see significant content add. And then if we look at this whole concept of vertical integration as kind of a final piece in the way we’ve really targeted our new business wins, we’re getting a much better vertical integration profile on our business. Definitely in the Americas, it is really the way China continues, Asia continues to operate and even true, albeit maybe to a lesser degree in Europe.

And as we look at that improved vertical integration, that’s historically been just a better profitability profile on our business and again, just a reminder that vertical integration doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to produce all that material, because as I think about our business, one of the things we’re staying true to is kind of the fundamentals of this business can operate with relatively low margins, but if we’re good asset managers, we can generate a lot of cash. So we’re looking, it’s vertical integration in terms of our ability to control the supply chain. So when we kind of look at it from those different parameters, if you will, I think we’re pretty optimistic that stabilization helps us the way our new business comes on and what we’re not winning from supply chain control and then just what’s happening in China with the amount of content being driven into vehicles, we think that’s particularly positive.

So, we should see performance improvements out of all three regions and not just being dependent on Asia to continue to drive the profitability in the business.