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Visteon Corporation (VC)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 23, 2017

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Transcript

Bill Robertson

Management

Good morning. I'm Bill Robertson, Vice President of Finance for Visteon. Welcome to our Earnings Call for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year of 2016. Please note this call is being recorded and all lines have been placed on listen-only mode to prevent background noise. Before we begin this morning's call, I would like to remind you this presentation contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and conditions or rather are subject to various factors, risks, and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements. Please refer to the Slide entitled forward-looking information for further details. Presentation materials for today's call were posted on the Investors Section of Visteon's website this morning. Please visit www.visteon.com/earnings to download the material if you've not already done so. Our Form 10-K was filed earlier this morning with the news release. Joining us today are Sachin Lawande, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Christian Garcia, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We have scheduled the call for one hour and will open the lines for your questions after Sachin and Christian's remarks. Please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. Thank you for joining us on our call today. Now I'll turn it over to Sachin.

Sachin Lawande

Management

Thank you, Bill. On Page 2 let me briefly cover our consolidated fourth quarter 2016 results for our Electronics Product Group. The fourth quarter is traditionally one of our strongest quarters on a seasonally adjusted basis. I'm particularly pleased with our overall performance in the fourth quarter across several key metrics. We achieved sales of $803 million in the quarter, an increase of 4% versus the fourth quarter of 2015. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $98 million and our 12.2% adjusted EBITDA margin was 150 basis points improvement compared with the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted free cash flow of $79 million was up 20% versus the fourth quarter of 2015. We won $1.3 billion in new business in the fourth quarter, with significant wins in key product areas which I will discuss in more depth later. I'm very proud of the work of Visteon employees around the world to generate the strong results and help us finish the year on a high note. In the rest of the presentation, I will provide more details on our operations in the quarter. Moving to Page 3. On this page, we highlight key accomplishments for the year. 2016 was the first full-year of execution of our strategy and I'm pleased with the progress the company has made in sales and business development, profitability, and in other key operational areas of the business. We delivered $3.1 billion in electronic sales, while launching 59 new products during the year, two-thirds of which were in China our largest market. New business wins reached a record $5.4 billion, up 26% year-over-year. Visteon is now clearly seen as a strategic supplier by several of the leading auto manufacturers in the world. Our backlog of $16.5 billion at year-end is 11% higher than a year earlier. With…

Christian Garcia

Management

Thanks, Sachin, and good morning everyone. Let me provide the company's key financial results for the fourth quarter and full-year 2016 for our Electronics Product Group which are shown in Page 14. As explained on prior calls, our financial results are impacted by a number of items that make year-over-year comparisons difficult. The adjusted financial information presented on this slide excludes this items and represents how we manage the business internally. These are non-GAAP financial measures that are reconciled to U.S. GAAP financials in the attached Appendix that starts on Page 21. Also we have reclassified the majority of our climate and interiors businesses as discontinued operations in our financial statements. As a result, our income statement has been adjusted to exclude the portions of climate and interior specific income expenses that are now reflected as discontinued operations. The financials on this page reflect our ongoing Electronics Product Group and exclude discontinued and other operations. Electronic sales of $803 million in the fourth quarter increased by 4% compared to prior year. This is the highest quarterly growth rate we experienced in the year. In the quarter, we saw a double-digit growth in Asia driven by new product launches in the region, particularly in China. As Sachin mentioned, we believe that the momentum that we have seen in China in 2016 will continue into 2017. Adjusted EBITDA for Electronics was $98 million, representing an 18% increase over fourth quarter 2015. The year-over-year increase largely reflects higher volumes and favorable currency related to balance sheet evaluation. Adjusted free cash flow for Electronics was positive $79 million in the quarter versus $66 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. The increase is primarily explained by increased adjusted EBITDA. I will cover each of these metrics in more detail on the following pages. On…

Sachin Lawande

Management

Thanks, Christian. Moving to Page 20, in closing we are very pleased with Visteon's performance in 2016 and that the value we delivered for our customers and shareholders. 2016 was the year in which we set the foundation for a much stronger Visteon, a technology focused company poised to capitalize on emerging cockpit electronics trends. I'm very proud of the work that everyone at Visteon has done to put us in the strong position. As we said at the Deutsche Bank Conference, in early January, we project our sales to grow to $4.7 billion in 2021 driven by current all-time high business backlog and expected new business wins this year and in 2018. Furthermore we increased our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin objective to 14%. In short, we are excited and optimistic about our future. Thank you for joining us today. Now I would like to open up the call for any questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of David Leiker with Baird. Please go ahead.

Joe Vruwink

Analyst

Hi good morning, this is Joe Vruwink for David.

Christian Garcia

Management

Good morning, Joe.

Joe Vruwink

Analyst

I wanted to talk about new business awards, if I just look at the quarterly cadence of what you have been winning, when you have been winning it seems that Q2 of last year suddenly something happens where Visteon is booking at a much higher level than it had been and subsequent quarters you continue to book at this elevated level. Now I don't know if it's easy to say CES 2016 was a very important event, a lot of good stuff shown, you've talked about meeting with more automakers and so I can tie up back into that. But the reason I ask is CES 2017, so what you did last month seemed to be an even bigger and better event, you certainly had a lot of new products, Phoenix's going to be meaningful and so is that event the driver where we can expect another stair step in new business awards may be next quarter, the quarter thereafter and sustain that higher level?

Sachin Lawande

Management

Sure. So Joe the first thing I would say is with respect to new business wins, these tend to be lumpy and what we have seen historically is the second quarter is around then many of the OEMs finalize their sourcing decisions and it also happens to be the case this year that we see many of the decisions also likely coming into the fourth quarter. So that kind of explains just the lumpiness of this, the wins. On the question regarding CES, CES is obviously a strong boost in terms of improving our visibility. What -- the main reason why I feel that we will continue to have a strong performance with new business wins are the trends that I talked about earlier. So HMI, cockpit HMI is going through a transformation that we haven't seen in the last little while and we are seeing a lot of new awards that are coming up and we think that on account of the product portfolio and the technologies that we have, the excellent showing at CES that we will be a in a very good position to continue our track record and grow the new business trends that we have outlined. We mentioned earlier at the Deutsche Bank conference that we have a target that we have to achieve over the next couple of years and I feel confident that we will be on track to achieve the goal.

Joe Vruwink

Analyst

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And then last question for me, in moving the profitability target up to 14% margins from 12% at the same time you are guiding to a higher cash restructuring outlays this year where that have been an item that was on the decline. So I'm just wondering can I tie that into may be Visteon, I don't know if uncovering is the right word but finding more opportunities in the manufacturing systems to take cost out and that's going to be the savings that are behind the 200 basis points that are long-term targets.

Sachin Lawande

Management

First of all I would say we are looking at driving our efficiency in all aspects of our business. Cost, focus on cost is a very big thing and we have demonstrated that we can take cost out while taking on more programs and winning more business and by the way also executing a record number of new product launches. So this will continue as we have said before this transformation we are just about I would say halfway through this transformation that is still lot more that we see as opportunity that we will go after. And one thing I would like to add is in addition to being more efficient and taking cost out as well as doing some footprint optimization activities, we are also developing all of our technologies as platform technologies. There is a big difference in terms of the cost when you go and develop a solution custom for a customer versus applying a platform across multiple OEMs. This is a transition that we've started already when I first started here towards the second half of 2015 and we will continue to apply this approach which will result in our engineering cost which is a biggest cost here in the company becoming more efficient and that will contribute in a large way to the improvements that we see that will result in the higher profitability. The other thing we've said is also that we expect benefits of scale to factor in. We have I think done very well within the flat environment to drive profitability higher but as the new business wins start to convert into revenue we expect to see the effect of scale also to kick in. Christian, would you like to add anything to this?

Christian Garcia

Management

No. So Joe to summarize what Sachin has said, cost efficiencies, platform based -- move to platform based and third is leverage across a larger revenue base. Those are the three items and the restructuring program that we are instituting or implementing currently is just part of that journey.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tavis McCourt with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Tavis McCourt

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hey thanks for taking my question, a couple. First on the China business, so if you look at 2016 ex-foreign currency changes it was up 43%, I don't have the kind of China production numbers top of my head, but obviously that's well above overall domestic production. And so I'm trying to get a sense of how sustainable is that level of growth in China above and beyond China production levels. And then if you could help us understand how much of your China business runs through the consolidated JVs versus those that run through wholly-owned subsidiaries? And then second one more of a strategic question, Sachin, on the autonomous products or platforms you expect to be announcing next year. Can you help us understand why you are not late to this market? So from kind of our perspective number of Tier 1 suppliers and Tier 2 suppliers and players from outside the auto industry and most OEMs had several announcements on autonomous projects, why is this not a way to succeed?

Sachin Lawande

Management

Certainly Tavis let me have Christian answer the first part of the question.

Christian Garcia

Management

Before I turn it over to Sachin talk about China, I just wanted to correct what something you said the 43% is Q4 okay and that compares to the production volumes of about 16%. So on a year-on-year basis full-year we went up by 26% and that is compared to 14% production volumes, okay. So the question that you had is whether or not this is --

Sachin Lawande

Management

And those are the main drivers of our performance in China were the new product launches. We started to see first effects of the new product launches in Q3 of last year and that impact continued into Q4 and we expect to see that continue into 2017. In addition, we also have a very healthy level of new product launches planned for China in 2017. So the combination of the product launches last year and this year we expect that to drive our performance in China to a similar level in 2017 as well. Now turning to the second part of the question why do we believe we are not late to the autonomous driving opportunities. What I would like to say here Tavis is that, there is a big shift in terms of underlying technologies that are required to implement Level 3 and higher automation as compared to Level 1 and 2. Level 1 and 2 what you would term as ADAS can be implemented with conventional technologies. Conventional by that I mean normal programming and software approaches for image recognition and detection and classification that are the sort of the underlying technologies that drive those applications. As we go into the autonomous driving world the level of accuracy that can be achieved with conventional technologies are not sufficient to be able to handle all the very different and wearing conditions that you would expect on the roads for autonomous driving. To be able to achieve that you have to get into a couple of different areas that are extremely new, very new to the industry as a whole. One is the general topic of sensor aggregation and sensor fusion. So you cannot do Level 3 plus autonomous solutions with a very distributed approach where the sensor data is…

Tavis McCourt

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Yes, that's helpful and then final question I guess more of a clarification so obviously 2016 turned out to be a great year for new business wins and you mentioned $12 billion is the goal for 2017 and 2018 is that just from kind of your legacy business or that include business wins from the new businesses as well?

Sachin Lawande

Management

It is primarily from current core products and we have indicated that we expect only a fairly small share may be 10% of that to come from the new products that we are launching or will launch here very soon such as Phoenix Infotainment.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Brinkman with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Ryan Brinkman

Analyst · J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

I think it seems clear to me that there is increased interest in Visteon in the public markets following the HARMAN's agreement to be purchased by Samsung right, because you guys are now a public share play in terms of automotive electronics infotainment which investors have identified as a strong growth area. I think you could see evidence of this in the amount of investors that crowded into you tent at CES this year relative to your past and arguably you can see them a share price too. So my question is would it be reasonable to assume also that there is increased interest in Visteon in the private market, is a consumer electronics or software technology company thought that they needed to gain entry into automotive electronics. Would an acquisition of Visteon give good way for them to go about gaining that interest and then conversely are there technologies or company that you are potentially looking to acquire, how would you raise your appetite for M&A generally?

Sachin Lawande

Management

Yes, well both are good questions but frankly Ryan what I would like to do here is not to focus on hypotheticals. The short answer to your first question is who knows right and we here are really focused on driving hard on the opportunities that we see which as you can see from this earlier discussion are just tremendous. There is a lot to be done; we are roughly half way through our transformation. We see tremendous further value creation opportunities and for that we need to remain extremely focused. So the thing that we are trying to drive within Visteon here is a culture of a focus and execution sticking to our strategy and then really delivering above our customers' expectations. With respect to appetite that we may have for certain technologies or capabilities that we should acquire, we are definitely looking at those options and at the same time I would say that we have a very disciplined approach in terms of not overpaying or paying beyond what we see as fair value for those assets. So we have demonstrated that we can implement and build technologies organically on our own and unless there is a compelling reason why a position would help such as perhaps pull in the time to revenue unless we find really good options we would stick to our current strategy. But we are continuously looking, we are very interested in talking to companies and finding out what's out there that might benefit our strategy.

Christian Garcia

Management

Right. So Ryan if I can add to that, the criteria that we use in selecting candidates are up clearly fit, the returns that we could generate from M&A activity, and the third is time to value extraction, if it takes a long time then we would drive to build it ourselves.

Ryan Brinkman

Analyst · J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

I see that's very helpful, thanks. And then just may be a more conventional question, of the strong sort of EBITDA margin expansion that you see over the next several years, I mean it's been driven I think in large part by this SG&A leverage even lower dollars in some periods year-over-year. As you start to invest more in Phoenix et cetera and then that result in strong organic revenue growth. Subsequent to that, should we start to think about more gross margin leverage are contributing to the operating margin expansion rather than leverage of fixed operating expense?

Christian Garcia

Management

Right. So there are really two stories. One is the outer years where we're actually going to see the benefit of the backlog that we have created here. But in the coming years in 2017, there is no question we would challenge. If you think about what Sachin has mentioned earlier we are going to see EBITDA growth through cost efficiencies platform based and also the leverage towards a larger scale. We would wait for the larger scale in 2019 and beyond. The platform based we are still continuing that transformation and so in the very near future it's all about cost efficiencies right especially in 2017 where we get very little help from the top-line.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Lim with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

David Lim

Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hi good morning congratulations. Just two questions. There has been lot of talk about border tax and I was wondering if you guys could give us a little bit more color on how would that impact you. I know right now more theoretical and hypothetical but other suppliers have sort of -- gave a little bit of framework and we are wondering if you could do the same there and then after that I have one other follow-up?

Sachin Lawande

Management

Sure. Hi, David. Well the short answer is that we can't really provide you with too much in terms of specifics with respect to all of these changes that are being discussed by this administration. Having said that we continue to analyze any potential changes and how that might impact our business and there are quite a few. There is talk about so-called border tax adjustments, there is NAFTA, and sometimes I think people use them interchangeably which is probably not accurate. So until there is more specific information that's available to us that we can then correlate to the impact of the business, I think it's too premature to talk about it. But let me at this point turn this over to Christian to see if you would like to add any more color to it.

Christian Garcia

Management

Right. What I would like to add to Sachin's comments is really NAFTA, I should not David, is a trade agreement between Canada, U.S. and Mexico that specifies the duties and tariffs apply to the trade within those countries. Ultimately the way we think about this any replication of NAFTA will have to go back to the guidelines of the World Trade Organization and obviously that's the body that governs trade among its member countries and United States is part of that. So that's NAFTA. The other one is border tax adjustment and that's why we like to bifurcate the two because the border tax or border tax adjustment on the other hand is a component of Congress's effort towards corporate tax reform. They will say proposal from Congress as you know what they call the House Blueprint. And the Blueprint has many elements actually there are many elements that are actually positive for business. They actually reduce the statutory tax rate from 35% to 20%. It has a deemed tax for repatriation that incentivizes companies to bring back taxes, bring back cash to the U.S. certain exclusions and eliminations and the border tax which eliminates the deductibility of cost imports for tax purposes. So all this I have said let me supersede it by the administration's own proposal for on tax reforms. So as Sachin mentioned it's too early to say that whether or not there is going to be a revision to NAFTA or there is going to be a passage of our bill that reform our tax, corporate tax code or both. And many economists are also theorizing that there need to be adjustment to exchange rates that would mitigate any additional cost associated with any sort of change. So given all this it is quite impossible to ascertain the implications for the company but as you can say, as you can see we are monitoring this very closely.

David Lim

Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Got it, thank you. And my follow-up is on the infotainment Phoenix platform seems very impressive. Sachin any kind of idea or indication of how early you can announce a win and just some color on if you could provide some additional color on the receptivity of Phoenix so far since the CES launch? Thank you.

Sachin Lawande

Management

Sure. So at CES I think you or David we had an excellent deception of this new technology by all of the customers. And what I was really pleased with was that we were able to follow-up with all of those opportunities that CES opened up within about four to five weeks. So we had detailed discussions with engineering teams at OEMs all over the world and we are in further discussions and follow-ups that such a engagement typically entails. Infotainment tends to be a fairly large decision for any OEM. They have their existing set of suppliers. As I mentioned in my comments when it comes to mid and high infotainment, the list of competitors is actually pretty small. And I think with the changes and some of this sort of the landscape shifting that has occurred it creates opportunities for us beyond what just the technology and the newness of it and the capabilities would lead one to think. So my expectation is that we will start to see more in the second half because it takes a fair amount of time for these opportunities to convert from discussions into decisions and so I would stay tuned second half of this will probably be when we will be talking about Phoenix in terms of wins.

Operator

Operator

Your final question comes from the line of Brian Sponheimer with Gabelli. Please go ahead.

Brian Sponheimer

Analyst

Just a couple of quick ones as most have been answered. Christian if you could just talk about the balance sheet adjustments that drove the $10 million year-over-year EBITDA growth and how much that repeats currency levels in 2017?

Christian Garcia

Management

Yes. So as I mentioned $10 million actually was impactful for Q4 and it's a one-time -- it's a balance sheet evaluation for the Yen and Euro, mostly on the Yen, and I'm not going to speculate on what the currencies are, but given the fact that it's that large we would expect that to be to one-time benefit in the quarter.

Brian Sponheimer

Analyst

Okay. And then on the $400 million buyback you said a mix of open market purchases and ASR, any idea as to what that balance would be and potential thoughts on timing on when you'd like to get going on it?

Christian Garcia

Management

Yes. We're not going to provide details on that in this call. But what I'd just say that we're currently in a blackout period and we will execute sometime after -- after we get out of blackout.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I'd like to turn the call back over to Sachin for any closing remarks.

Sachin Lawande

Management

Okay. So thank you and with that what I would like to do here is to thank everyone for participating in today's call and for your ongoing interest in Visteon. At this point, we will end the call. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

This concludes Visteon's fourth quarter and full-year 2016 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.