Gunnar Wiedenfels
Analyst · Evercore ISI. Your line is now open.
Sure, look Kutgun, as you know, free cash flow has been one of our top priorities from a financial perspective, the most important metric, and we have really changed the entire company’s mentality here. This was not a fact anyone looked at three years ago, and we have a pretty well oiled machine now, and that’s one of the reasons why we continue to put up these strong cash conversion rates, even with some top line pressures especially on the linear side. The balance sheet, I think is in very good shape now. By the end of this quarter, we will have paid down $19 billion of debt since closing the transaction, and we will continue to be super, super focused on this. At the same time, I also want to reiterate that I’m not worried about any maturities. I view our capital structure as a real asset. The terms that we locked in between the rates and the maturity profile are an absolute strategic asset for this company, so we’ll continue to focus on bringing net debt down further. I continue to believe that 2.5 to 3 times is the right leverage target for this company, but it’s not the end-all, be-all target of this company. Specifically for free cash flow in 2025, again we’re going to continue to focus on it. Talking through some individual building blocks, we want to continue growing content investments, albeit with continued improvement of our ROI against those investments, and I see evidence of that every day. Moving further through the free cash flow walk, working capital will be strong again in 2025. We did have a good result in ’24, even though there was a drag of almost $500 million from paying down some of our securitization facility opportunistically, which I don’t expect to happen in 2025. We’ll obviously benefit from lower debt load and corresponding interest payments. We are going to see a little more capex as we expand our production footprint, predominantly in Leavesden, expanding our capacity there, and restructuring expenses are going to continue to come down. But to your point, the absolute dollar amount in the end is going to be mostly driven by the resulting final EBITDA number, of course.