Magna International Inc. (NYSE:MGA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Adam Jonas : Thanks, Pat. Just one follow-up on the capital intensity. You look back 10 years, 20 years on Magna and your CapEx has been around 4% of sales. And I’ve never seen it at 6%. You’re going to be near there this year. You called out that, that’s kind of temporary and it will decline thereafter. But beyond that, as we think of the shape of decline from 6%, are we — is 4% the wrong number? Is a new normal, maybe closer to 5%? It seems like the capital intensity in the business might be structurally rising for the next few years. Am I wrong there? Should we kind of throw that 4% out the window?

Patrick McCann : I think in the near term, Adam, the 4% would be below. I was at a very — actually Swamy, myself, we were at a very capital-intensive group in our career. And really what you see when you look at a cycle where you have awards, the growth is just not lumpy. And right now, with the growth that’s ahead of us, you’re putting heavy investment in and this is beyond a Magna issue as well where you’re growing with a new industry when you’re looking at EV penetration is going up, and we’re transitioning our portfolios from one to the other. But more importantly, we’re growing with new products that requires significant capital. So we are above 5%. We expect to be above 5% through our outlook period but it’s going to normalize. Where is it going to normalize down to? I see no reason it wouldn’t normalize back down to where we’ve operated historically.

Swamy Kotagiri : And a little bit more color, Adam. I think we operated generally around $1.8 billion or so, even for 2022, and we ended up at $1.7 billion. Some of it was deferrals into ’23. And as I mentioned, we had a record level of awards in 2022. That means requires capital prior to program launches. And as I said, this is a 30% higher than 5-year average bookings. So I would say about $500 million of that is in 2023 alone is in the megatrend areas. This includes battery enclosures, which is the lion’s share, and along with power and electrification and new mobility. But I think as Pat mentioned, we expect this to be back to the normal levels. We are confident that how we see it unless there is a new business, which would be good news at that point. But the ratio should be back to where we historically have been.

Patrick McCann : But Adam, if I could just add, just to be clear, these investment decisions are return-based transactions, and we haven’t compromised our return expectations. This is capital that we’re growing. If you come back to our capital allocation strategy, its number 1 priority is to grow the business, grow it internally, externally, whether it’s greenfield, brownfield. But if we’re generating returns at our appropriate expectations, that’s our priority, and we continue down that path. We haven’t made a decision to decrease returns with the objective of growing sales. This is — the objective is to grow returns in the future and drive value for shareholders.

Operator: Our next question is from the line of Peter Sklar with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Peter Sklar : Good morning. You’ve talked this morning about the elevated level of engineering costs that you’re incurring. It sounds, like they’re mostly related to vehicle electrification and ADAS. So can you talk about, like how do you get a return on that investment? Is there a customer reimbursement and this is a timing issue? Or do you recover it through the programs? And I assume you recover these costs through the programs. And when is the crossover point when these programs are the sufficient? They ramp — they’ve begun, they’ve ramped, they’re of sufficient scale that you start to recover some of these costs?

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