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

Chris McNally: Absolutely. And then, the last one for Q4, because obviously there’s a lot of moving currents in Q3. On ASUX, I think you talked about 8% to 9% rough margins for the year. It sounds like from the commentary, some of the recoveries were pushed from Q3 to Q4. The first is that 8% to 9% still pretty good, even if it’s the low end, because it points to a nice material pickup in the ASUX [sic] margins. And I think we’ve been sort of looking for that because that’s a large portion of the drive towards the 2025 goal.

Kevin Clark: Yes.

Joe Massaro: Yes. Yes. Full-year, the current guide would have ASUX at 8% and S&PS at 11.6%.

Chris McNally: Perfect. Three for three. Really appreciate it, team.

Kevin Clark: Thanks.

Joe Massaro: Thanks, Chris.

Operator: Next we’ll go to Itay Michaeli from Citi. Please go ahead.

Itay Michaeli: Great. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just a couple of thoughts for me. First, going back to the Q4 margin outlook, I was hoping you could just kind of dimension the seasonality factors in there. It looks like you’ll be exiting closer to 13% ex-strikes just kind of curious how to think about the baseline as we look to bridge into 2024. And then second question, just hoping to talk more about the ADAS wins you had in Q3, maybe content per vehicle, and also any updated discussions with customers for Gen 6.

Joe Massaro: Yes. Itay, I think as you look at and we’ll obviously stay away from 2024 at this point, but I think if you looked at I sort of give our standard cautions, right? I’d focus more on H2 versus Q4, because Q4 can be heavy with things like engineering recovery. So I think it’s more H2 adjusted for strike. But listen, as I — as you just go through the progression here, and as I mentioned to Rod, we’re clearly have got the benefit of some volume increases offsetting strike. But our margin rates at the segments as well as total call — total company are tracking to the original guide and that’s tracking to that Investor Day model. And as I mentioned to Rod, the $1.7 billion of performance, the $900 million of labor are falling in. So if you go — so I think we’re on track. If you’re going to start to look at back half, I would — I think H2 is a better proxy than just Q4. And then you obviously have to adjust for the strike.

Kevin Clark: On conversations with customers about Gen 6 ADAS platform, I would say we’re an active dialogue with roughly a dozen Asian, European and North American so interaction there and strategic dialogue is very, very strong, going very well. As it relates to the Q3 bookings, the bulk of those bookings were in and around radar solutions that are being plugged into existing ADAS platforms with OEMs in Europe and in China.

Itay Michaeli: Perfect. That’s all very helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Next we’ll go to Emmanuel Rosner. Please go ahead.

Emmanuel Rosner: Thank you very much. I was hoping you can help us frame and quantify the exposure to electric vehicles either in terms of current revenue or more importantly, actually in terms of future growth of a market or percentage of backlog, not just within high voltage, but generally speaking, because to your earlier point, you’re selling low voltage components to like very large EV manufacturer. And obviously a lot of the new programs over the next few years would probably have been on new EV platform. So anyway, to maybe quantify when you sort of like look at this outgrowth expected over the next few years, how much of that would have landed on EV platform.

Joe Massaro: Yes. Emmanuel, its Joe. Listen, I think Kevin frames sort of how we’re thinking about long-term, right? We were conservative. I think we didn’t sort of follow everybody down the path is going to be 50% in the next couple of years. So from what we see now remain confident in that outlook. We do expect growth to slow. We just get to the law of larger numbers. You get almost a $2 billion business. You’re going to see growth rates slow over time. As I mentioned earlier, if you look just over the past call it eight plus quarters, high voltage has typically provided 2 points of growth over market round numbers, a little bit higher in certain quarters up to 2.5, 3. But on average two, this quarter, it provided a point of growth over market, so meaningful, but not — certainly not all of it.

And then 80% of the business at this point, including revenue and bookings is with the European and the Chinese OEM. So we had not historically gone down the path of the North American products at least the initial products, I think were very niche, right? They were the high end SUVs, sort of more of the unique type vehicles. We have some content on them, but they were by no means the bulk of the business. So I think from — I think that should help frame it at this point.

Emmanuel Rosner: I appreciate it. Joe, the reason I’m asking for EV exposure outside of high voltage is, there’s a large seating supplier that would be ideally the most powertrain agnostic product you could possibly sell slashing their backlog by 20%, because all these new seats were going to go on new EV platforms, basically, which are either being pushed out or it’s sort of like lower volume.

Joe Massaro: Yes. I can’t speak to the seating business, obviously like I said; we’re 80% European and Chinese concentration. I’m not sure who you’re talking about or what their portfolio looks like.

Emmanuel Rosner: No, no, no. my comment was EV exposure outside of high voltage, any way to frame that?

Joe Massaro: No. I think we’ve provided what we’re going to provide, Emmanuel.

Kevin Clark: Yes. Emmanuel, from our perspective, vehicle architecture just given the fact that we’re on one of every three vehicles globally, if they’re not building a BEV, they’re building a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. And more likely than not, we’re on that vehicle. So with that low voltage vehicle architecture. So for us, I would say there’s virtually no impact.

Emmanuel Rosner: That’s helpful. My follow-up is on I think you were mentioning your mix impact. That’s sort of like a little bit of a headwind in the quarter outside of just the strike, obviously, in North America. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on the other region? Was it sort of like I mean customer mix specifically, and which region?