Magna International Inc. (NYSE:MGA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Patrick McCann: Morning Dan. It’s–I’m pausing here to answer. When you think about our complete vehicles business, you really have to consider a bunch of factors. One is what products are in that facility at that point in time, so in the first half of the year, we were still producing the BMW 5 series, and that’s rolled off, and now we’re going into–we’re in the middle of launching the Fisker program. But what you see more broadly when you think about a European business like Steyr is there is quite a difference in profitability between the first half of the year and the second half of the year just more broadly. We haven’t changed our expectations for our Steyr–I keep saying Steyr, but our complete vehicles business for the full year.

We had a few–we had some positive engineering outcomes in the first half of the year, but those were factored in, and we get into the second half, we’re still pushing towards that gross margin expectation. Long answer, but I don’t see anything unusual in the second half of the year that we should be reflecting. It’s just launch, but it’s planned downtime.

Louis Tonelli: I mean, we started the year at 1% to 2%. We’re at 1.6% to 2.1%, so all in we’re actually increasing our outlook in complete vehicles.

Dan Levy: Right, and I know that generally we shouldn’t look at the quarter as there is seasonality and whatnot, but is that second half–I think you talked about it, is that specifically being dragged by launch of new programs or is there something, just timing of input costs?

Patrick McCann: No, it’s [indiscernible]. If you think about what happened, it’s primarily the launch, the planned downtime that you have through the summer, and then you have another downtime through the December period.

Louis Tonelli: And we’ve expected that throughout the year.

Patrick McCann: Which is every single year.

Dan Levy: Okay, all right, so that’s an [indiscernible] thing we should extrapolate going forward?

Patrick McCann: Absolutely.

Dan Levy: Okay, great. Thank you. Second, Swamy, a question on your vertical integration efforts in EVs. Historically in EV, setting aside LG, you were mostly focused on the drive unit and you’d outsourced motors and inverters. Can you just talk about the supply agreement with Onsemi? Is this a foray into making your own inverters or is this just a partnership to get inverters from a third party?

Swamy Kotagiri: Yes, I think Dan, we talked about it a little bit over time in terms of the building blocks and what are some of the key pieces to get to the full e-drive system. Even before the LG JV that you mentioned, we made inverters and we had the capacity to do that between Magna power train and Magna electronics group. We’re just taking one step forward when we talked about Onsemi, just looking at whether it is silicon carbide or [indiscernible] or something, just the overall power electronics strategy, how and what should we be doing, so it is just part of that overall strategy. We always had the ability to do inverters, now we’re just doing it collectively in our LG JV, so this is just further vertical integration to bring value-add into the system.

Dan Levy: Great, thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of James Picariello with BNP Paribas. Please proceed with your question.

James Picariello: Hi everyone. Just to clarify, more of a housekeeping item on the intangibles amortization, can you just quantify for legacy Magna what the intangibles amortization amount was for last year, just to have some bearing as to–I mean, I know it’s immaterial, but what was that number?

Patrick McCann: Yes, we’ll have to get back to you, James, because it is immaterial. It wouldn’t be a big number. If you think fundamentally, we haven’t done an acquisition of a technology company, so we haven’t experienced this situation where you have such a significant amount of acquired technology intangibles, and that’s really what’s driving the $60 million Louis was referring to. But we can get back to you with the exact number, but it’s not material.

James Picariello: Understood. Then just on Veoneer, it looks like the guide shows a billion in revenue and, based on the 20 basis points of margin dilution impact, about $30 million to $35 million operating loss for the seven months. If we annualize that for Veoneer, we’d be looking at $1.7 billion in revenue and approximate $60 million operating loss. Just curious if you could bless the thinking on the annualized run rate for Veoneer here.