Aptiv PLC (NYSE:APTV) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rod Lache: Great. Thanks for that. And just lastly, obviously a lot of controversy around autonomous right now with crews slowing down, just 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 a like a $1.7 billion performance and lower supply disruption kind of element to your 2022 to 2025 of rich. How much of that are you seeing this year?

Kevin Clark: Yes. 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 Motional, 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 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.

Joe Massaro: Hey, Rod, 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 2022 to 2025, 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 2023 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. Obviously, as we sit here today, and it’s sort of stated obviously within the comments I made, right, we do have some higher volumes helping offset the strike impact, but for the most part, those performance initiatives are coming through as planned, and we’re seeing that particularly on the offset of the labor expense.

Operator: Thank you. Next we’ll go to John Murphy with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

John Murphy: Hi, good morning, guys. I have another follow-up on this toggle on EVs, and the penetration rate maybe being a little bit slower than people had expected. Kevin, as you look — Kevin and Joe, I mean, as you look at this, an optimist could say, hey listen, 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 be gross over the market a little bit, but our earnings and cash flow might be a bit better. Is that potentially true here? And as you’re making these capital commitments to these programs, or 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.

Kevin Clark: Yes. It’s a great question, John, and I’ll start. Listen, we still are believers in electrification and just 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, as we stated, we’ve been very focused on having a — a 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. I mean 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 of 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, we’re still optimistic about our competitive position here and the growth opportunity and the margin opportunity it presents.

Joe Massaro: Hey John, it’s Joe. The only thing I’d add to, we’ve talked about this for a while, right? Particularly with the electrical architecture business, 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 for us, and we’ve got obviously, a very large architecture business. So I think leveraging that over the last couple of years has helped that product line get to 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.

John Murphy: 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 run through this, how would you think about seasonality for Wind River? I know you talked about it earlier in the year, but just if you can remind us.

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

John Murphy: Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you very much.