Gentherm Incorporated (NASDAQ:THRM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matt Koranda: Okay. Fair enough. And then, on the margins for the back half, I think, you’ve got to be kind of north of 13% to hit the midpoint of your EBITDA margin guide. So, maybe Matteo, if you could bridge us from the first half performance, which I think was in the mid-11%-s into that kind of mid-13% range? How do we get there? What are the big elements and levers of improvement? Maybe I mean, whether you want to do that via some of the buckets that you called out in gross margin in the release or core Gentherm margins versus Alfmeier? I’ll let you take your pick on that.

Matteo Anversa: Yes. Sure. I’ll do it both ways. So you’re right, the first half was about 11.5%. We need — in order to hit the midpoint, we need the second half to come in at about 13.5%. So, you have a 200 basis point lift sequentially. And there are really three drivers. One is volume, so that would give us, as we are expecting revenue in the second half to be a little higher than the first half will give us a lift of about 100 basis points. The second aspect is Alfmeier. Alfmeier has been running in the first half of the year at the low single-digit EBITDA rate. We’re expecting to hit mid-single digit by the end of the year. So, you’re going to have a lift on the Alfmeier rate. And that’s fundamentally driven by further acceleration on the price recoveries, where Alfmeier has been a little bit behind compared to the legacy Gentherm business.

So that’s about 40 bps of expansion sequentially. The rest will come through sourcing savings. As you know, most of the sourcing savings, particularly around rebates, tend to come later in the year, as well as a little bit of a further improvement in productivity at the plants in the legacy Gentherm business. So, that’s the walk. One, I think, important thing to note particularly as it pertains to the revenue is that the current outlook that we provided this morning does not assume any impact of a potential UAW strike, which clearly is an unknown right now.

Matt Koranda: Okay. That’s great. And very clear on the breakouts there. Thanks, Matteo. And then I guess just the last one wanted to address was the plant expansion in Morocco and Mexico, maybe just speak to the capabilities in the new facilities? What that provides you? Why the footprint expansion? And then just in terms of the — it sounded like you said you’re going to be on the lower end of your CapEx guide. Does your CapEx outlook for this year incorporate costs from those new plants? And then maybe just if you could address total cost in terms of expansion there?

Matteo Anversa: So, let me maybe address the CapEx question first, then Phil, you can address the rest. So, CapEx in the first half is about $14 million, which is about even split between maintenance and growth. We are expecting the second half to be in the range of about $35 million, $40 million. And that includes a little bit of CapEx for continuing to build in some contingency related to Ukraine and then a $5 million to $10 million CapEx related to the expansion that you just talked about. And then the rest is really primarily split between growth to fund the new programs that we won and a little bit of maintenance. So that’s kind of what we are seeing on the CapEx.

Phil Eyler: Yeah, Matt, I’ll just talk about the plants. First of all, we’ve done an extensive search for the appropriate location, and we’re very excited about expanding our footprint in Morocco and Monterrey for multiple reasons. And what’s really driving it, to be honest, is just growth. We’ve got our record awards. Within a couple of years, we’re going to outstrip our manufacturing capacity around the world. We have to do it. There’s no real choice. And the other side benefit to expanding in these locations is going to give us a lot more flexibility to optimize our footprint and how we manage our high labor content production in the most cost-effective way. So, we believe not only this is going to allow us to reach the growth in front of us, but also to drive our gross margin improvement.