David Dauch
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thank you, Chris, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss AAM's financial results for the second quarter of 2015. Joining me on the call today are Mike Simonte, AAM's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Alberto Satine, our Senior Vice President of our Driveline business unit; and Chris May, our Treasurer. Before we cover the second quarter earnings announcement, I'd like to discuss two important announcements that we made this morning. First, today, we announced the appointment of Mike Simonte to President and Chris May to Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, effective August 1, 2015. Mike has been instrumental to our profitable growth and success and a key leader in building a solid financial foundation for AAM. His financial experience will be a great benefit to our operations as we continue to implement our growth strategies while driving operational efficiencies to build stakeholder value through operational excellence, quality and technology leadership. Chris has demonstrated outstanding leadership at our finance organizations since he joined the company in 1994. His deep institutional knowledge will allow for a smooth transition, and an immediate positive impact on the future direction of our company. I'm extremely confident that Chris will continue to effectively lead the finance organizations, support of our plans to sustain solid profitability and improved cash flow performance. AAM also announced the appointment of Alberto Satine as President of the Driveline Business Unit, and Norman Willemse to President of the Metalform Products Business Unit, both of which will report to Mike Simonte. These new appointments continue to strengthen our leadership team that will guide AAM's to its next level, profitable global growth, while continuing to expand and diversify our customer base, product portfolio and served markets. The second release relates to the source in GM's next generation full-size pickup and SUV program. I'm pleased to report today, that AAM has been selected as a target supplier of axle and driveshafts for GM's next generation full-size pickup and SUV program. AAM was selected by GM as the target supplier for this program under GM's strategic sourcing process, otherwise known as the SSP process. A key objective of the SSP process is to involve critical suppliers early in the process of designing and developing future vehicle applications and programs. Pending final design direction and completion of the sourcing process, AAM expects to retain approximately 75% of the sales content provided in GM for the current full-size pickup and SUV program. AAM expects to provide approximately 75% of the light duty axles, 100% of the heavy duty axles, and 100% of the rear steel driveshaft for GM's next generation full-size pickup and SUV program. AAM does not expect to provide the aluminum driveshaft, front and auxiliary driveshafts and steering linkages on the future program. With the strategic sourcing of multi generate into this program now clarified, AAM is pleased to reaffirm our long term partnership in relationship with GM. AAM's innovative product, process and systems technology, as well as our cost competitive global manufacturing, engineering and sourcing footprint provides the compelling value proposition for all of our customers including GM. With the direction of a core program of AAM's business now solidifies for many years to come, we will continue to focus on leveraging our long term commitment to quality, technology leadership and operational excellence to drive top global growth and business diversification. Our first focus in this regard is to redeploy the manufacturing engineering capacity that will be freed up as a result of GM's finance for the next generation program. We expect this capacity in the meantime to be fully and profitably utilized for the next three to four years to support GM's need on the current K2XX Program. This gives us ample time to work with other customers to identify the best opportunities to put this available capacity to work. The annual sales value of AAMs core and emerging new business opportunities currently exceed $1 billion. The vast majority of these opportunities relates to non-GM business launches and activities. Most of these programs have expected launch dates in the 2018 to 2020 period of time which lines up well as compared to the expected transition to the next generation GM full-size truck program. One specific program we are working on is in the final stages of the [ph] courting process and has the potential to offset close to half of the impact to the GM sourcing direction. Well, we do not have anything to announce today with respect to that program, we are confident in our ability to identify new business opportunities over the next few years to fill the gap and accelerate our business diversification. If you have questions regarding these two announcements, we'll be able to address those during the Q&A session here today. So let me now provide some highlights associated with our second quarter financial results. Let me first state that AAM's second quarter financial performance was highlighted by quarterly records for sale and profit dollars, driven by sales growth that continued to outpace the industry and strong operational performance. First, for the second quarter of 2015, AAM's sales increased 6% on a year-over-year basis to $1 billion. AAM's sales growth of 6% compares to 4% year-over-year growth for the U.S. SAAR in the quarter and 3% for the North American light vehicle production. The second quarter of 2015 marked the first time in AAM's history that our sales exceeded $1 billion in the quarter. We're very proud of that. Second, non-GM sales grew 15.1% on a year-over-year basis to $343.1 million, a new quarterly record for AAM. Including the impact of our Hefei, China joint venture, AAM's non-GM sales to date were approximately 37% of our total sales for the quarter. One of the key drivers supporting AAM's non-GM sales growth is our sales to FCA, the launch of driveshaft in support of FCA's L-Series platform and higher shipments supporting Ram's heavy-duty pickup and the all-wheel drive model to the Jeep Cherokee and Chrysler 200 accounted for approximately $30 million of the increase. Third, our net income was $58.6 million in the second quarter of 2015 or $0.75 per share. Fourth, AAM's key operating and profitability metrics continued to show strength in the second quarter of 2015. Our gross profit in the quarter was $164.5 million, and our EBITDA was $146.9 million. Both of these results were quarterly highs for AAM. And fifth, AAM generated $100 million of positive free cash flow in the second quarter of 2015. This strong result keeps us on track to achieve our full-year 2015 free cash flow target of $175 million, a target that translates to one of the highest free cash flow yields among the auto supplier peer group. In reviewing our first half of 2015 performance, I'd like to highlight a few items. From an operational perspective, we are currently enjoying high capacity utilization rates in North American facilities due to the strong end market demand for pickups and SUVs. With the large cadence of our largest North American programs more than a year behind us, we have achieved improved operational stability. Our facilities in Three Rivers, Michigan and Guanajuato, Mexico are running exceptionally well supporting these high-volume and high-level demands. We continue to work on productivity initiatives and process optimization at our operations, which should translate into sustained profitability and stable free cash flow generation for many years to come. In the second half of 2015, AAM is laser-focused on flawlessly launching many new customer programs. In Europe, we're delivering full front and rear axles now for Jaguar Land Rover in a new global passenger car program. In Rayong, Thailand, we're launching AAM's first ever major driveline program for Ford in support of a global rear-wheel drive SUV program, and we're in the middle of that launch right now. And in China, we're supporting the next-generation C- and E-class for Mercedes while also expanding our supplier relationship with them and launching independent rear axles for multiple SUV variants for China application. Also in China for FCA, we'll be providing PCUs and RDUs for a third EcoTrac Disconnecting All-Wheel-Drive derivative. And finally here in North America, we'll be providing high-efficiency front and rear axles for the refreshed Nissan Titan light duty truck program later this year. Many of the programs I just mentioned features AAM's advance product technologies, design to increase fuel efficiency, advanced lightweighting initiatives and improved safety ride and handling performance. In supporting these efforts, our R&D spending in the second quarter 2015 was $29.5 million. And in the first half of 2015, we spent approximately $57 million on R&D. AAM remains committed to technology leadership and the advancement of both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies that will propel AAM to the forefront of the global driveline industry. We're confident that our engineering initiatives such as the development of the next generation AAM EcoTrac Disconnecting axle technology, and our [ph] AAM electrification strategies will continue to drive AAM sales growth and diversification. With the future opening of the Advanced Technology Development Center, otherwise known as the ATDC here in Detroit, we will have a state-of-the-art facility to further advance our design, prototype, benchmarking, and validation expertise and where customers will be welcomed to experience AAM's advantage firsthand. Our team of engineers believe that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And at the ATDC, it will be done there and will be a great place for us to further advance our forward thinking. Let me now make a few remarks regarding an update to our new business backlog and our outlook for 2015. AAM's revised estimate of the backlog of new and incremental business launching from 2015 to the 2017 calendar year period of time is now estimated at $875 million in future annual sales. This compares to a previous estimate of approximately $825 million for the same three-year time period. Our revised estimate is principally reflective of capacity expansion program for a global light vehicle program, particularly in SUV, in the China market. Reflecting the change described above and a launch delay with one of our customer programs, the revised cadence of this backlog now stands at $275 million in 2015, $225 million in 2016, and $375 million in 2017. With respect to our 2015 outlook, we're revising our sales outlook for the full year in 2015 to a range of $3.9 billion to $3.95 billion, down from the initial outlook of $4 billion to $4.1 billion. The primary driver of this reduction in AAM sales target for the full-year 2015 is the impact of lower metal market pass-throughs and foreign currency translation. Our revised 2015 sales outlook also reflects the impact of a launch delay in the customer program I mentioned earlier. AAM's revised 2015 sales outlook is based on the anticipated watch schedule programs in our new and incremental backlog and the assumption that the U.S. dollar runs at a range of 16.5 million to 17 million units for the full year here in 2015. Also with respect to the guidance, we're raising our guidance as it relates to EBITDA and increasing net margin target to 14.25 to 14.5. So we're very pleased with that 50-basis-point improvement. And lastly, AAM is targeting free cash flow for the full year in 2015 of approximately $175 million, which we expect to drive our leverage profile to [indiscernible] by year-end, which is in line with what we're guiding for. Mike will make additional comments on our 2015 outlook in a few minutes. To add to our longer financial outlook from 2015 to 2017, what we have guided remains unchanged at this time. And as we look to the future, we remain focused on delivering our plan to sustain solid profitability and improve our free cash flow performance while leveraging our technology dealership and to develop innovative market-driven products to achieve profitable global growth and business diversification [indiscernible] continuing to delivery extra profit and cash flow performance for the benefit of all of our key stakeholders. We firmly believe that AAM's best days are ahead of us. And with that said, that concludes my remarks for this morning. I thank everyone for your time and attention today and for your vital interest and support in AAM's not only today but for years to come. Thank you and I'll now turn it over to Mike Simonte.