Kevin Clark
Analyst · Wolfe Research. Dan your line is open
Thanks Elena and good morning everyone. I'm going to begin by providing an overview of the fourth quarter and full year, highlight several of our key 2018 milestones and provide some perspective on how we’re thinking about end markets for 2019. Joe will then take you through our 2018 financial results as well as our more detailed outlook for 2019. I’m pleased to report a strong finish to 2018, a testament backed visibility to drive sustained out performance even in a challenging end market. Revenue, operating profit and earnings per share all finished above the guidance we provided in October. For the full year, revenue of 14.4 billion represents 10 points of growth over market, reinforcing the strength of our portfolio of advanced technologies aligned to the safe, green and connected mega trends. The strength of our technology portfolio also resulted in record new business awards totaling $22 billion for the full year exceeding our prior year record of 19.3 billion. Our 2018 financial performance also validates the robustness of our business model that can deliver in any environment that’s positioned for solid, true cycle performance. As we kick off the New Year, we remain laser focused on delivering value to our shareholders. Given the current macro and geopolitical environment, we believe it’s prudent to be balanced in our 2019 planning assumptions, which we’ll cover in more detail shortly. However, we are confident that the long term fundamentals of our business remain intact and I’ve never been more confident and excited about our future, as Aptiv is perfectly positioned to capitalize on the trends driving Auto 2.0 and deliver sustainable revenue and earnings growth, while continuing to invest in our future. Turning to slide 4, building a strong sustainable business that makes the world more safe, green and connected is the focus of our management team. We made significant progress executing on a number of strategic fronts in 2018. First, we had very strong revenue growth over market and a record customer new business awards, giving us confidence in our revenue growth outlook, and reinforcing that we have the right software, computing systems integration capabilities, required to help our customers adapt higher levels advanced safety, electrification and connectivity. Second, our record cash flow generation and disciplined capital deployment reinforced our strategy for a long term shareholder value creation. We funded both organic and inorganic growth initiatives including additional capacity to support our strong backlog of Active Safety Business awards, investments to fund the further development of our automated driving capabilities, smart vehicle architecture and connected services, and the acquisition of KUM and Winchester Interconnect further establishing Aptiv as a market leader in engineered components. In addition we repurchased $0.5 billion of stock over half of which was in the fourth quarter, taking advantage of market disconnects over the course of the year. So in total, we returned over 700 million to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. Moving to the far right of the slide, as always we remain maniacal about our cost structure constantly working to improve the competitiveness of our business model and lower our breakeven to increase the flexibility of our cost structure and be in a position to fund the incremental growth investments, while delivering earnings and cash flow growth. While we’ve been in this journey for some time, our focus on continuous improvement means we’re never finished. Our DNA is wired to naturally focus on delivering material and manufacturing efficiency, and also reduce overhead costs. 50 million of overhead and stranded cost-related to the Powertrain spinoff were actually eliminated during 2018. Further, our engineering resources are critical to executing in our pipeline of new business awards. Our continued focus on maximizing engineering efficiency and effectiveness with [added] methodologies, reusable software platforms and other tools allows us to expand our capabilities in software, artificial intelligence, machine learning and systems engineering, faster than we’ve grown on engineering spend. In summary, our continuous improvement mindset is helping us improve operational efficiency, while allowing us to meaningfully invest in our future. Turning to slide 5, you could see fourth quarter new business bookings total 6.5 billion, bringing the 2018 total of 22 billion well above 2017 record of just over 19 billion. As I mentioned, these bookings are the direct result of our widening competitive mode and several advanced technologies across both advanced safety user experience and signal and power solutions. Beginning with active safety, where we won 3.9 billion of new customer awards topping last year’s record of 3.7 billion. These awards include multiple scalable level 2 plus programs, leveraging our unique [satellite] architecture, active safety domain controller and perception systems. Infotainment and user experience customer awards totaled 2.8 billion, driven in part by integrated tactic controller solutions, reinforcing our leadership position in central compute. In engineered components booked 6.5 billion of new customer awards, including 1 billion in high voltage connectors, bringing 2018 high voltage electrification awards to $2 billion double the amount from the prior year. Our continued momentum in new business bookings validates our ability to leverage the unique brain and nervous system or the software and hardware foundation that we’ve created and that enables new features and functions, while optimizing the total system cost of the vehicle. Turning to segment highlights and advance safety user experience on slide 6, sales for the fourth quarter were up 12% that’s 14 points over market. Continued strong consumer demand for active safety and infotainment solutions drove revenue growth of 54% and 8% respectively. As the need for more complex software development and systems integration expertise increases, our unique ability to offer highly functional optimized solutions has driven several of our 2018 new business awards including six new central compute awards in 2018 across multiple domains including active safety, infotainment as well as body, chassis and propulsion, bringing our collective total customer awards to 11. The most recent example shown here is our Conquest win with PSA for scalable active safety, leveraging our satellite architecture solution which is being deployed across a multiple vehicle maker models and represents our 7th such award in active safety. Finally, operating margins expanded 170 basis points for the year, excluding the impact of mobility investments, demonstrating the benefits of our competitive positioning and our cost structure. Turning to slide 7, our signal and power solution segment is focused on next generation vehicle architectures including high speed data and high power electrical distribution to enable advance technologies that will shape the future of mobility. For the quarter, sales increased 6% that’s nine points over market despite the weakening macros, driven by over 50% sales growth for high voltage electrification products and very solid double digit growth for engineered components. Under scoring our industry leading position in vehicle architecture, we were recently awarded the high voltage electrical architecture on the Jeep Grand Cherokee. This high value, high volume award validates the increasing need for optimized high voltage architecture across a full range of vehicle types. In 2018, high voltage electrification revenues approached 300 million, that’s up over 60% year-over-year, making it one of our fastest growing and most profitable product lines. Based on the value of our new business bookings, this product line should reach over 1 billion of revenues in 2022, representing a 40% compounded growth rate over that period. In summary, given the breadths and depths of our portfolio in both segments, we are perfectly positioned to benefit from the convergence of auto 2.0 trends, and we’re confident in our ability to continue to grow revenues in excess for the underlying markets. Given the more challenging macro landscape heading in to 2019, on slide 8 I’d like to provide some context for the key assumptions that underpin our vehicle production outlook for the year. As we look ahead to 2019, we expect to see continued softening of vehicle production around the world. At a global level, we expect vehicle production to be down 2.5% for the full year and down 4% in the first half. From a regional perspective, I’ll start with China as I know it’s top of mind for many of you. We expect vehicle production to decline 11% in the first quarter and 8% for the full year. And while we will continue to experience strong revenue growth over market in this region, driven by double digit growth in our key product areas including active safety, infotainment and high voltage electrification, we’re preparing for structurally lower industry volumes going forward. As a result, we’re being prudent from a cost structure perspective. We reduced salary cost in this region by almost 10%. Turning to the other regions, we expect low single digit production declines in North America and Europe. However, similar to China, we also expect revenues to grow in excess of vehicle production, given our new launch cadence and market share gains. Finally as Joe will outline in more detail shortly, we expect our portfolio of safe, green and connected technologies and balanced regional customer and platform mix to more than offset the industry macros contributing to strong growth over market once again in 2019. Before I turn it over to Joe to go through the numbers, I’d just like to highlight another great year at CES. As we’ve done in the past, we’ve provided automated rides on the streets of Las Vegas accumulating nearly 10,000 of our talented smiles during the week of CES alone. While a number of our customers, our investors and our partners took advantage of our vehicles transport from the destination in and around the strip, downtown or to and from the airport, we also supported our normal operations for the general public. And since its launch earlier last year, we’ve conducted over 30,000 rides on the [list] network, receiving a near perfect 4.9 star rating out of five underscoring the quality of the ride experienced. Further (inaudible) we gave customers as well as investors, a look at the advanced software and hardware architectures that are enabling the safe, green and connected solutions our customers are demanding. In total, we had over 100 customer meetings and hosted a number of senior executive customer VIP visits which underscored the increasingly strategic growth Aptiv plays in delivering fully integrated and optimized vehicle architectures. Our technology display showcased our value add across the full vehicle staff from perception sensors or perception systems to cloud with unparalleled strength in advanced safety, the in-cabin experience, data services and our cabinet solutions. As compared to the increases, our customers appreciate that given the architectural right today, is critical to delivering the feature rich, high automated vehicles they need in the future. As a result, we position Aptiv as the only integrated provider of both the brain and the nervous system of the vehicle, capable of conceiving, classifying and delivering the advanced architectures, making the future of mobility real. So with that I’ll hand the call over to Joe to take us through the fourth quarter and full year results and review our outlook for 2019. Joe?