Visteon Corporation (NASDAQ:VC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ronald Jewsikow: And maybe just sneak one quick question on BMS, your second customer launch, can you update us on the timeline when that’s expected and the markets that will be offered in?

Sachin Lawande: Yes. So, we will start to ramp our production later this year, and I believe the customer production of the vehicle starts in the first quarter of next year, so pretty close in terms of when we will go into production. I should also mention that there are several vehicles that will be launched fairly quickly after the initial launch, so pretty excited about that ramp-up next year.

Ronald Jewsikow: Thanks. I’ll hop back in the queue. Appreciate it.

Sachin Lawande: Thank you.

Operator: We will take our next question from Mark Delaney with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Mark Delaney: Yes. Good morning and thank you very much for taking my questions. First, relative to the China domestic OEMs, you mentioned your exposure there and having less new sales into some of these are China domestic OEMs. What steps, if any, is Visteon taking to better address those customers and how long may it take to have traction?

Sachin Lawande: Yes. And you might recollect we’ve previously said that we have already done a lot of work in terms of achieving a better balance between domestic and global OEMs in China. A few years ago, that distribution was 80/20, global OEMs to domestic. I believe last year, it was more 60/40, so coming closer to our ideal 50/50 share that we would like to see. So, what actions have we taken? We have really increased our engagements with OEMs in China, domestic OEMs that we believe will have a good performance. This includes customers like Geely that we have talked about before, but also JMC, and we continue to ramp up our engagement with them. So we are very optimistic about especially our cockpit domain controller product line in China, also looking at displays as a differentiated product from our side. So lot more to come based on some of the engagements that we are currently having.

Mark Delaney: That’s helpful. And then thinking about some of the technology development trends underway in the industry, some of the OEMs have discussed using gesture and voice controls as an added part of some of these future platforms. Visteon is at the intersection a lot of these key tech trends, and so I was hoping to better understand what Visteon may be seeing to the extent interaction with the vehicles moves beyond touch. Is that an opportunity for Visteon?

Sachin Lawande: Yes. So we do see a lot of this since we have been already part of many of these technology initiatives at different customers. And to be honest, the success has been somewhat mixed in terms of the customer feedback, especially with gestures. Voice, on the other side, has had a greater level of success, especially with the introduction of smarter systems like Alexa and its type in the industry. So we remain very close to the key partners there, whether it is a Google or Alexa or Nuance, in terms of voice technology. And the gestures and other technologies, we are participating in and working very closely with OEMs with their partners there. So the main thing is that all these technologies are driving a higher need for computing resources within the vehicle, and that’s what is contributing to the content increase if you see, not just at the luxury end of the market, but also coming into more of the mass market vehicles.

So we think all of these types of initiatives are good for business for Visteon.

Mark Delaney: Thank you. I’ll pass it on.

Sachin Lawande: Thank you.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Shreyas Patil with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.