Nexteer Automotive Group Ltd

HKEX:1316

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nexteer Automotive Group Limited 2022 First Quarter Investor Communication Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Investor Relations Director, Mr. Tony Wang. Please go ahead.

[Tony Wang, executive]

Okay. Thank you, Jason. Good day, everyone. Welcome to the phone of the Nexteer Automotive 2022 First Quarter Global Investor Call. On the call today, we have our Executive Board Director, President, CTO and Chief Strategy Officer, Robin Milavec; Senior Vice President and CFO, Mike Bierlein.

Today's call will be relatively quick, taking around 40 minutes covering a few latest updates from the company for Q1. Robin will be the first to provide an update of the company's business development and then Mike will give an introduction of the latest operating environment as well as full year outlook. Beyond that, we will take some questions.

I would remind you of today's communication package that has been posted on our company's website and the safe harbor statement that governs today's communication. Now I will hand over to Robin.

[Robin Milavec, executive]

Okay. Thank you, Tony, and good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all of you joining us on the call today. So I'd like to provide a business update for the first quarter. We're seeing that the auto industry continues to experience significant disruptions driven by elevated material costs and ongoing global supply chain constraints, which has been extended from last year. And more recently, the geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe and the COVID lockdown in China are making the operating environment even more challenging and unpredictable. But first, I want to take a minute to thank our team as they tirelessly and very collaboratively worked on base material price increases, economic alignment and commercial strategies literally around the clock, day in and day out to minimize the macroeconomic headwinds and other supply chain constraints that had the potential to disrupt our customers, ourselves and our supply chain partners. We're very proud of what's been accomplished so far, yet much remains to be done.

In a few minutes, Mike will spend some more time to explain the evolution of the operating environment that we're navigating through, and how we expect the trend to progress as we move forward.

Turning to the business highlights for the first quarter. I'll cover 3 major topics today: customer program launches, new business bookings, including our first high-volume Steer-by-Wire business award, and awards from Automotive News that we formally received on 2 new technologies.

So on this next page, our launches for the first quarter. We successfully launched 11 new major programs, 1 in North America, 2 in EMEASA and 8 in Asia Pacific. These cover both global and local nameplates amid a very challenging supply chain environment. As you can see, the chart shows our continuous launch for new electric vehicles, marked with the green symbol, and it also shows the launch for new businesses where those product names are shown in red font. So 10 out of the 11 are new business launches for next year. [indiscernible] highlight the Ford F-150 electric pickup truck. This is a good proof point that our leadership position in the North America full-size truck market continues with the EV transition, and I'll talk more about that on the next slide.

But these achievements in Q1 set the stage for another strong year of product launches, which are an important part of our growth strategy. We have more in store for the remainder of the year, including our premium high-output EPS, which is applied to the launch of a Level 5 autonomous electric vehicle as well as a first program launch for one of the mainstream Chinese start-up companies.

Next slide, please. So regarding the North America full-size truck market, we've been honored to provide our Rack EPS steering systems to all the Detroit's Big 3 in support of their ICE platforms. As these OEMs have developed the BEV version of these platforms, we've also been honored to secure those electric platforms as well. This strategy will provide a seamless transition for next year as volume begins to ramp down on those ICE versions and ramps up on the BEV versions. Our latest launch in this area is the Ford Lightning, which features our Rack EPS system with a 10-FIT high availability technology as well as our Power Column. These industry-leading technologies further strengthen our position in this critical North America truck market.

Now in addition to the Ford Lightning, next year's steering and driveline technologies are featured on the GMC Hummer EV and the upcoming electric Chevy Silverado. These programs highlight how well Nexteer is positioned in the convergence of the electrification trend and the truck market with our premium steering and driveline products.

This next slide summarizes a strong booking award for the first quarter as well as the booking projection for the balance of the year. We successfully booked $2.7 billion in Q1, which is 4x higher than in Q1 last year. With continuous booking inflow moving forward, I'm confident to say that 2022 will be another strong booking year, which will support the company's midterm growth when you compare to our current annual revenue size.

For the full year, we're expecting bookings to exceed $6 billion in lifetime revenue. In Q1, all the bookings awarded were with our EPS product line and 81% of those bookings will fall within our EMEASA division. It was really a great quarter in terms of Conquest bookings as 83% of the total were secured away from our competition, which provides longer-term growth over market for next year. And finally, nearly all the bookings in Q1 were on EV platforms.

I have 3 highlights about these achievements. First, I'm very proud that Nexteer was awarded the first high-volume production Steer-by-Wire business in the industry. It will be a milestone moment to unlock the value of this future steering technology and the lifetime revenue of this single booking contract is one of the largest in our company's history. In addition, we're seeing more and more incumbent and potential new customers showing serious interest to adopt steer-by-wire with their next-generation vehicles and seeking out Nexteer's leading technology in this area. Second, in addition to the 2 mainstream electric pickup truck platforms we discussed from the last page, our leadership position in the North America full-size truck market was further strengthened with a third EV truck business win in Q1.

Next, we successfully broke through with another Chinese pure EV player with our steering systems, which shows our technology is fully aligned with this electrification megatrend. It's really just incredible to see what's been achieved in the EV market during the past 2 to 3 years. We do believe this trend will continue to solidifies Nexteer's leading EV position in the industry. At last, I'll remind you that we started to provide quarterly booking updates since the first quarter of last year. It demonstrates a clear view on how our booking performance progresses each quarter. We plan to use bookings as a major metric to visualize our business wins instead of backlog in both formal interim and full-year results announcements.

In our current dynamic market, backlog did not provide a consistent guidance given the significant and volatile changes of production forecasts, program status and FX assumptions, which were all uncontrollable factors that are embedded in the backlog calculation.

Finally, I'm very pleased to share 2 Nexteer's solutions that have been named finalists for the prestigious Automotive News PACE and PACEpilot awards. Now for 28 years, Automotive News PACE program has honored superior innovation, technological advancement and business performance among automotive suppliers. It's judged by an independent panel and PACE is recognized around the world as the industry benchmark for innovation. The PACEpilot program recognizes pre-commercial innovations in the automotive and future mobility space.

These represent product, software systems or process and idea incubators that have the potential to revolutionize an automaker's business. Our PACE Award finalist is our automated steering actuator. This innovative steering solution removes the literal and figurative barriers of shared autonomous vehicles that operate in geofenced, at last-mile in neighborhood vehicles. This breakthrough technology achieves higher speeds, higher steering loads and overcome safety, durability and many other challenges that have come along with such a daring endeavor.

This solution achieves new levels of reliability for self-driving vehicles by pioneering redundancies in software, electrical hardware, mechanical and environmental ceiling. It also overcomes challenges in steering heavier, battery electric shared autonomous vehicles by leveraging our high output electric power steering that enables this steering actuator to support the higher loads than ever before. Current autonomous steering systems are based mostly on traditional use cases. However, with shared autonomous vehicles, they require increased life expectancy, durability and robustness.

Our automated steering actuator doubles the current standards for EPS and is designed for serviceability. Our PACEpilot award finalist was announced in March of this year is our new software solution with tactile mobility that improves overall safety and performance by detecting and proactively communicating changing road surfaces like wet, dry, icy and other conditions. This software solution advances life-saving steering safety to a breakthrough level with an innovative -- with an innovation that enhances the vehicle's awareness of its environment and its early warning communication to the driver. Our software fuses 2 algorithms, a steering-based analytical algorithm and a data-driven, machine-learned algorithm.

The resulting virtual sensor data doesn't require any new hardware in the vehicle. It's transmitted to the cloud service that communicates to trailing vehicles, therefore, vehicles automatically warn following vehicles about upcoming road hazards. In addition, when the vehicle is notified of an upcoming slippery surface, software in the steering system will mimic the steering feel of a slippery surface before the driver reaches the actual slippery road. Per human factor studies, giving an early sensation warning through steering field influences the driver to intuitively reduce the vehicle speed and thus drive safer. This industry recognition is yet another proof point of our commitment to relentless innovation and showcases how well positioned to support industry megatrends like electrification, new mobility, software and connectivity and autonomy.

Winners for the PACE and PACEpilot awards will be announced in September of this year.

With that, I'll turn the meeting over to Mike Bierlein, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, for some comments about our business outlook. Mike?

[Michael Bierlein, executive]

Thanks, Robin, and good day to all of you joining us on the call. I will give an update on the Q1 operating environment and business outlook for the remainder of the year. Starting with the first quarter, this slide highlights the latest global OEM production volumes as reported by IHS in May. As noted on the bar chart, Q1 Global Light Vehicle production compared against 2021 was lower by 3% or 0.7 million units. On a sequential basis, Global Light Vehicle production was lower than the fourth quarter by 6% or 1.2 million units. The soft near-term production performance on a year-over-year and sequential basis represents the impact of continued chip shortages across all regions as well as escalated geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe. We continue to experience customer schedule volatility resulting from these disruptions to the supply chain and the ongoing impacts from COVID-19, including lockdowns in China.

The customer schedule volatility continues to impact our operating performance as we are unable to optimize our manufacturing plans. Commodity price increases are an additional headwind as the global commodity markets are experiencing significant inflation. Looking at the chart on the lower left, we can track the price trends of steel, aluminum, copper and rare earth metals, which are the most significant commodities we use in our products. All of these commodities have increased, ranging from 1.3x to 1.5x compared with the beginning of 2021. We continue to work with our customers to recover these costs increases, with both contractual escalation agreements and other negotiations.

Looking forward, 2022 is providing the industry another dynamic and challenging environment given further supply chain disruptions, COVID uncertainty and continued inflationary pressures. OEM production volume forecast continued to reduce from earlier this year. IHS has lowered 2022 production volumes by 2.6 million units or 3.1% as of their May update when compared to their January forecast. This downward revision is largely resulting from China COVID lockdowns and the ongoing geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe. EMEASA is the most impacted with a reduction of 9.4%. Volumes for the first half of 2022 are down 1.1 million units or 2.8% compared to the first half of 2021, driven by reductions in EMEASA of 9.3% and Asia Pacific of 3.2%. Volumes for the second half of 2022 are forecasted to increase by 4.3 million units or 11.3% on a year-over-year basis, although volumes could be further impacted given the operating environment remains challenging with ongoing semiconductor shortages, China COVID lockdowns and the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

We remain optimistic that the operating environment will improve as we move forward. Nexteer is well positioned to continue to grow revenue above market levels. We are excited about the high-volume Steer-by-Wire business win, which is another proof point of our ability to leverage our technology strength to continue to grow the business. Thank you for your time today. I will now turn the call back to the operator, Jason, for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jessie Lo from Bank of America.

[Yu Jie Lo, analyst]

Rob, Mike. My first question is that looking at this production number guided by IHS in North America, we think it's still weaker than our expectations since people were looking out for some restocking to play out in 2022. So I still wanted to get your view on semiconductor shortage impact. And then is the outlook positive enough to support our growth target in second half this year?

My second question is, I wanted to check with you on this content value chains over time on the steering products. Also, I understand that it could be very difficult to come up with the average numbers. But what's the ASP trend of our product over these years? And to assess this ASP offside in coming years, could you elaborate more on first aspect, the high up REPS and its potential in the full-size truck in the U.S.? What kind of penetration do you think the market can reach for this product in U.S.? And second, as we spend a lot of effort to develop the industry-leading technologies such as Steer-by-Wire, what's the upside potential in this particular product ASP? Yes, that's my 2 questions.

[Robin Milavec, executive]

Can you take the first part of that, Mike?

[Michael Bierlein, executive]

I'll start on your first question relative to IHS. so we have seen downward revisions to the global IHS forecast as we've been moving through the year and largely related to, say, macro factors, including chip shortages that we've seen and latest estimates as far as the chip shortages that we will continue to see these impacts through 2022 and maybe even into 2023 before it is fully stabilized.

Other things that we're certainly currently watching is related to China COVID lockdowns and the potential impacts of supply that we're importing as well into the North America market.

[Robin Milavec, executive]

Jesse, this is Robin. Thank you for your question. I'll try and address the second part of your question about the average sales price of our products. I would say historically, if we looked at our steering products, generation to generation with internal combustion engine platforms as an example, there was certainly a lot of competitive pressure, generation to generation for those platforms, and we saw an overall reduction in our annual pricing as those competitive pressures influence the market price of those technologies' generation and generation. But now as we see this conversion to electric vehicles, we're finding the opportunity to introduce more premium products with additional content that changes the trajectory of the pricing in the market.

So these premium products and these additional functions tend to generate slightly higher prices. And we're seeing a lot of market demand for our technologies such as high-output Rack EPS, which was initially launched on the GMC Hummer vehicle. We just talked about how that is -- will be launched on this fully autonomous vehicle. And we're seeing a lot of other industry pull for this high output technology on other electric truck markets and even light commercial vehicles where we see opportunities for that.

And then if we look at the Steer-by-Wire technology, we're just very excited with that technology and the opportunity that it provides for next year because the Steer-by-Wire system in a vehicle essentially has 2 steering systems, one at the handwheel, which is -- which simulates the driver feedback and then we have the roadwheel actuator, which actually steers the vehicle. So there's increased content from a steering standpoint in Steer-by-Wire vehicles, and we see that as a very positive opportunity for next year, considering our current leading position with that technology and the strong pull from OEMs globally for that technology.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Lou Ji from BOCI.

[Jia Lou, analyst]

This is from Jia from BOCI. I have 2 questions. One is the follow-up on the Steer-by-Wire. Actually, we said that this is a high-volume order. So can management share with us more details about these orders, such as the -- which is the global OEM and its launch time and potential ASP if possible to share?

Yes. And my second question is regarding the announcement yesterday. As I saw that our CEO and Director, Mr. Zhao Guibin will be removed from his position. Any reason or background about his removal. And actually, we know that he has been Nexteer's Director and CEO for more than 10 years since our listing.

[Robin Milavec, executive]

Yes. Lou, this is Robin. I'll try and answer both of those questions. In terms of our Steer-by-Wire business award, we cannot disclose the OEM that we're working for. But I think you can see from our booking chart that large booking resides in our European division. So this is a European OEM, and it is a growth OEM for us in the steering business. And it is, as I mentioned, one of our largest business awards in the company's history, over $2 billion in lifetime revenue and over 10 million units throughout the lifetime of this vehicle platform. So it's something we're very excited about, working with this major global OEM on their future vehicle technology.

And then your question about the potential board changes. So what we know is that our majority shareholders have requested a shareholder meeting to vote on proposed changes within our Board of Directors, and that meeting is scheduled now for June 14. So we will know more after that AGM is conducted. And in the meantime, our management team just continues to execute our strategy for profitable growth and supporting all of our stakeholders around the world, and really not expecting any disruption or change in direction based on these proposed board changes.

[Jia Lou, analyst]

And a follow-up, just want to know regarding our corporate governance, would you please share with us about our major shareholder, AVIC's role in our business strategy and operations, especially in recent several years, when our business seems to have some struggle?

[Robin Milavec, executive]

My view is, we have 2 shareholder representatives on our Board from AVIC. They've been very supportive of our business and our management team, and I would expect that trend to continue.

[Operator]

There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question-and-answer session. Thank you so much for all your questions and today's participation. If there are any further queries, please contact us at [e-mail]. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

[Robin Milavec, executive]

Thank you, Jason.