PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim mentioned some of our business, including Latin America were higher than our expectations. We benefited from business mix. Some of our higher technology businesses were higher than our expectation as we called out in both of our releases. And we benefited within business from product mix. So we hit, I think, three big categories for us.Operator Our final question today comes from Jaideep Pandya from On Field Research. Your line is open.Jaideep Pandya Thanks. First, I want to go back to the EV point. Could you just give us some color on what is the content per vehicle for ICE versus EV? And in your top EV customers, are they all sort of the top Chinese companies? That’s my first question. And then second question is on the Industrial Coatings, where you alluded to weakness in the U.S. Have you seen sort of the destocking coming to an end in Q1 or are you expecting further destocking of weaker volumes from the coil exclusion categories in the U.S., especially in Q2 and Q3?

Thank you.Timothy Knavish – CEO Thanks, Jaideep. I’m going to be backwards with how you asked them. Just destocking, the — our Industrial segment businesses, there’s not a tremendous amount of inventory held at our customers. And so any significant destocking, whether it’s — frankly, whether it’s industrial or performance is largely behind us. But the softening that we mentioned in general industrial and in particular here in the U.S. is across a couple of key segments.One of them you already mentioned, and that’s coil because that’s largely tied to construction. But we’ve also seen softness in some consumer-facing areas, electronic materials, kitchen and bakeware appliance. Unfortunately, there’s some positives offsetting some of that as well on HD — heavy-duty equipment, transportation, powder.

But in general, those were the segments that were a bit soft.On your EV question, so the content per vehicle, unfortunately, there’s not a simple one number answer to do that because it depends upon the different technologies that are adopted by each of the OEMs. But what I will tell you is that the potential content per vehicle for functional and specialty protective coatings is significant and in the same scale as the content per vehicle of conventional layering systems, which can — that can range between $90 to $125 a vehicle.You had a question embedded in there about who are we working with. Who are we successful with in China. Generally speaking, we’re working with all of the OEMs, whether it’s Chinese or non-Chinese, but we have had most of our commercial success thus far with the number one player in EVs in China.Vincent Morales Jaideep, this is Vince.