Their mantra from the very beginning was to pursue technologies that are safe, green, and connected. That focus on the secular growth has actually contributed to 11% growth over market over the five years through 2022. Of course, there are questions from time to time about the growth and a lot of challenges. We've gone through semiconductor inflation. The peso appreciated over a 12-month period by 20%. Most recently, there's been some volatility and some questions about the exact trajectory of electrification. At the end of the day, Aptiv has a pretty impressive growth profile. They're one of the industry leaders in 8S, which is clearly shifting towards higher and higher levels of automation and higher content. They're a leader in electrical architecture, which gives them exposure to opportunities that are at least two times the kind of content you'd see in an internal combustion vehicle.
Their software platform is growing rapidly, and they've got this really small compute business that looks like it's going to have explosive growth over the next couple of years. So over time, Aptiv, at least this year, you've been talking about 6%-8% growth over market, maybe much more over the next couple of years. So with that as an introduction, I'm very pleased to welcome Joe Massaro.
Thanks for that, Ron. Yep, appreciate it. Good morning, everybody.
So I guess just to frame this, my first question is, if I go back to the 2019-2020 time frame, 2021, the company was a $14-$15 billion revenue business. And you were booking $21 billion of bookings a year. And those end-of-year reports, that's what we would see. So today, you're a $21 billion-$22 billion company. And you're reporting $33 billion-$34 billion of bookings. So that's 60% higher than where you are today. Do you believe that Aptiv, as we look out maybe to the 2027-2028 time frame, is Aptiv a $30 billion or more kind of company? Do you have that 8.5% growth trajectory kind of is that what we should be seeing?
Yeah, no, we certainly, and listen, I appreciate your comments. I certainly understand the last couple of years overall have been noisy with things like COVID and supply chain. And certainly there's some questions around the Growth Over Market calculation we can talk about today. But no, absolutely. I mean, if you go back and I think it's on a very consistent trajectory, too. We've always talked about our bookings converting into revenue two-three years following the bookings event. Production then ramps. Programs tend to last five-seven years. And sort of years three, four, five tend to be where we realize the most revenue. So we clearly are on that path. We've demonstrated it with the higher bookings numbers.
We took a big step up in bookings, to your point, over the last couple of years, driven by a couple of things, certainly High Voltage, but just as importantly, really driven by what I'll call sort of global, not only global awards, but global system awards. So in a lot of our businesses, we're tending to see more of a system sale than an individual component sale. We still sell a lot of components, radars, those types of things. But we're seeing, particularly in the Active Safety Level 2+, High Voltage, particularly in China, where customers are really looking for the full systems. And those awards obviously go a lot the dollar value of those awards go up when you talk full systems.
The other thing we've seen, which has helped these bookings grow in sort of overall size, is where you used to have even complex systems being split between one or two suppliers, between a couple of suppliers. For instance, we had a legacy active safety award where we were on the North American side. We had a competitor that was on the European side, two different systems going to market. As our customer rolled out the next generation system, they said, we're going to do a global system with only one supplier. And we won that last year. Right? So you're seeing a bit of consolidation of the opportunity volumes that are helping drive bookings.
We believe those roll out over the same, generally speaking, over the same period of time that, to your point, when we were $14-$15 billion of revenue, saw the $20+ billion of bookings, now at $21 billion-$22 billion of revenue in 2024 from 2018, 2019, we believe it's sort of that same overall trajectory.
You know, there's obviously a lot can change from the point when you book a contract and when that actually comes to fruition and you start to if it starts to materialize. And I think that the market is, to some extent, debating whether or not that algorithm is changing a little bit between what you say is the value and what it actually winds up being. And maybe you can spend a couple of minutes talking about the assumptions that you put into these estimates. So when you're telling us about $32 billion in 2022, $34 billion in 2023, how do you derive those numbers? And is there actually conservatism that's kind of employed internally to try to be accurate about that?
So the conservatism tends to come in the out-year revenue forecast. So at Investor Day last year, we talked about $40 billion in 2030. We have layered in some level of conservatism. We certainly don't use our customers' volumes. I think everyone knows in this industry, the industry is well over capacitated. You tend to have fairly robust estimates from OEMs on volumes. So yeah, there are certainly haircuts that go into the plan go into the overall revenue forecast calculations. Bookings, we tend to use IHS at the time of the bookings to have sort of a consistent mechanism as opposed to for both internal and external purposes versus folks being able to subjectively calculate that number. And then as we look to revenue forecasts, we apply we'll apply some level of conservatism.
But listen, if you think about a bookings award, right, you're always going to have adjustments on vehicle production, right? Vehicle production is going to move around. Apart from COVID or supply chain, if you go back to 2018, 2019, we think it moves within a relatively small band. We've sort of always assumed long-term sort of flattish vehicle production. Maybe it's down a point, maybe it's up a point in a given year. But you know and I think we're back there now in those sort of 92, 93, 94 million units of global vehicle production, including commercial vehicle, per year. So what would impact bookings significantly would be large program cancellations, right? We win a $1.5 billion active safety award. That's going to start production in 2026. It's a seven-year program. On an individual year, that gets relatively small, right?
So you're not necessarily if there's changes in vehicle production or changes in take rates on a particular customer, you're not having something that's going to impact a $20+ billion revenue stream significantly. What would be program cancellations, which we have not seen for a long time. The last time we had a, I'd say, as a large-scale program cancellation was back in that 2016 time frame when FCA at the time really pulled out of passenger cars in North America. So that was sort of a well-publicized, very large event. So those booking numbers, you know they'll change can change on the margins with FX, obviously, right? We book in China, we book in Europe, a stronger euro or a weaker euro, depending on what we used at the time of the booking. But it tends to be on the margins.
We really don't see big wholesale cancellations or product awards being pulled back from the customers.
When we talk about the growth again, 7%, let's use the midpoint of that growth over market range, that's about $3 billion worth of growth coming from that. Can you talk about the pillars of that growth? So if we divided it into High Voltage 8S SVA software, how big is each of those right now? And can you give us some updated color on what the growth rates are?
Sure. And I think it's important. And just given sort of what's happened over the last couple of months, I think it's important. Let's talk adjusted growth. And we'll come back to growth over market, but let's talk adjusted growth. Now, this year, it's a little our adjusted growth estimate is 6%-8% in a flat market. So it happens to be the same as the growth over market mathematically. But I think talking about adjusted growth is important. So we're expected to grow 7% at the midpoint of our range. That's really driven by a couple of things, right? We have still product lines that are growing outsize. So our Active Safety product line, which is now a $2.5 billion business at the end of 2023, that business will grow well north of 20%.
So call it somewhere between 20%-25%, probably towards the higher end of that range this year. We're continuing to launch new systems. We continue to see take rates being very strong in Active Safety. Active Safety is one of those product lines that our customers actually make money on and that end consumers have a strong demand for, strong rebuy rates, strong interest in the technology and the vehicles. So that strength is going to continue. We've brought our High Voltage growth rate down from approximately 30% to approximately 20%. Completely understand the concerns around EV headwind, but still a very strong product line from a growth perspective. And that growth is really based on customer schedules. So we have customers that have adjusted their schedules down over the course of last year.
This 20% is based on the schedules that we now have and are producing to now and that they have forecasted for the year. In addition to that, those are sort of some of the faster growing product lines, right? You also have within Aptiv an engineered components business. So think connectors, cable management, fasteners. So think something like a TE Connectivity, a Molex, an Amphenol that has really strong sort of call it mid single digit growth rates, as you would expect a business like that to have. Our electrical architecture business, the wire harness business, will tend to grow a little bit small, a little bit slower because it's very large. It's got content on about one out of every three cars manufactured globally, bless you. So you have an element of the market coming in on a business of that size.
But even that's a very strong 2%-4% grower. We don't have product lines that grow below vehicle production. I think we've done a nice job over the last few years sort of taking a look at the portfolio and making sure we really are in those safe, green, and connected areas. But there's a lot of drivers. And to Rod's point, I think the other thing, it's small dollars at the moment, but we're going to start to see a lot more software growth in the business. Our software product line, including Wind River, is a little over $500 million in revenue. We expect that business to start to grow significantly as you get out to 2026 and 2027. Last year, we had about well over $200 million of pure software bookings exclusive of Wind River.
Wind River also has about a $500 million, a little less than $500 million in annual revenues growing mid-teens. So I think that'll start to come on again, not necessarily in 2024 and 2025, but certainly as you get out to 2026 as we see those bookings come in.
So it's been easy for us to follow the bookings in Active Safety. It was a $2.6 billion-$2.5 billion business, $3.8 billion of bookings, high voltage, $1.7 billion business, and $4.6 billion of bookings. These SVA probably is only $100. It's a very small business today, $3.5 billion a year if you average the past couple of year bookings. But this is the first I've heard about the software bookings of $200 million. So you've had.
Kevin's talked about them in the past. I think you just have to sort of add them up as you go through the quarters as he's talked about them. But yeah.
Well, look, it's an interesting data point. Wind River, when you acquired this, you were talking about how this is going to be a pivotal acquisition for this company because there's so many problems that it solves for the auto industry in terms of product development, abstracting software from hardware, all the things that the industry knows that they need to do over their upgradability, all these things that Wind River has. So you've had a year now of Wind River under your belt. I'm sure you've been going to OEMs. And auto wasn't really a big business for them when you acquired.
It was not. It was not an area of focus for them.
So can you talk a little bit more about what has the response been and what are the data points that we should be looking for? How big will this be? How widespread will this be?
Sure. Yeah. Let's back up a little bit. So we acquired Wind River over a year ago now. Wind River is an intelligent edge, real-time intelligent edge software company. So it provides a cloud-enabled system for devices that need high levels of compute out on the edge. So think aerospace and defense, telecom, industrial automation, where the amount of compute needed on the device is too significant to completely depend upon the cloud. It's tied to the cloud as it relates to software like lifecycle management, upgrades, patches, that type of thing. But the compute really needs to be done on the device because of the real-time nature of what that particular device is doing. We started a development project with Wind River prior to the acquisition to really look at is that software stack what auto needs, right?
Auto is missing a sort of complete software stack for these large domain controllers that can do what the industry wants, that can be cloud-enabled, that can manage the full lifecycle of the software over the life of the vehicle, that can give the OEM a relationship with the second or third owner of the vehicle, which for our customers is very important. You hear our customers talking a lot about their ambitions to earn revenue over the life of a vehicle that's going to come through the software, the ability to update features, the ability to have sort of subscription type or almost streaming type revenues with the owners of the vehicle. We felt Wind River was very well placed to do that. To your point, since acquisition, there's been some wins. There's been certainly progress in automotive.
They're partnered now with Hyundai Mobis to build out that automotive software stack. One of the ways I think about this, if you've followed us for years around Smart Vehicle Architecture, we've often talked about the hardware, the large compute platforms that go into the vehicle. Wind River will be the software stack that will help run those large computes. There's been wins with a European truck manufacturer on an individual Domain Controller using Wind River technology. And there's been a couple of wins on Active Safety systems with a couple of Chinese OEMs. And I would say our experience as it relates to both Wind River, Smart Vehicle Architecture, and certainly electrification, Chinese OEMs are moving very quickly.
And you know I talked about typically a bookings cadence where we'd book something in two-three years out, we'd start revenue on, start generating revenue that the systems would be in production. China's at the very end of that, at the very end of that range, even on more complex systems. So we're seeing active safety systems, which in North America, Europe would be at three years plus maybe a couple of months before it hits the road. The Chinese are able to put that on the, particularly the newer EV players, able to put those systems on the road within about two years. But software, it's progressing. We had a thesis around really what the industry needed. Wind River has solved those problems in 3 industries in a significant way.
You know the aerospace industry went through domain consolidation over the past 10 or 12 years on some of the newer platforms. Telecom's going through domain centralization now as it goes through the 5G rollout. And certainly industrial automation we've seen over the last couple of years as the factory automation, industrial tools become more intelligent, become more robust in factories needing a lot more compute. And Wind River's provided the software for that.
How big is this a $500 million business all in? It's growing at what rate? What should we be looking for in the next couple of years?
Yeah. We bought it, it was right around $400 million of revenue. Last year, it finished a bit below $500 million. Really no automotive revenues per se yet. So those are those other red markets that are.
The $200 million was automotive only?
The $200 million was non-Wind River. That's software bookings with Aptiv's. And that's bookings. So again, that'll turn into revenue in a couple of years. I'm talking about Wind River revenue now, just to be clear. So we expect it to be over $500 million of revenue this year. And automotive revenues we see really kicking in, as we've talked about before, in sort of 2026 in earnest. Possibly you see some in the second half of 2025, but meaningful revenue starting in 2026.
So there's double-digit growth still in that business. And one of the things that I was a little surprised by the way that this was sort of portrayed on your earnings call. So obviously there were a lot of questions about you were a 2% growth over market company last year with a lot of unusual things that happened. And then you bridged us back to 6%-8% growth this year. And one of the ways that you did this is in China, there was some market share shifts and launch issues that subtracted 200 basis points. You added that back. In North America, same story, the Japanese gaining. You added that 200 basis point back, 100 basis points from the UAW. Some of those things feel like they're structural, right? You know the US automakers didn't really lose inventory during the strike.
I was hoping you can maybe go back to that and just explain, is there a different way to look at that reacceleration that's a little bit more granular than, well, let's just add back the stuff that was bad?
Yeah. I think it's a good question. Listen, I think, and certainly appreciate really since November, all of the questions. Understand the concerns around Growth Over Market. You know, and that is a metric we provide. Well, anybody can calculate it, right? That is not a metric that's unique to us or that we can only come up with. That is effectively our growth, either by region or total company, over global vehicle production. And we get global vehicle production from the same places you folks would, right? Usually an IHS or check it against an LMC on a forecast basis, but actuals are actuals. So that is sort of a number. I know a lot of suppliers use it. It's used to evaluate suppliers. Completely get it. We for years have said that number will be lumpy. And that number in part is lumpy because of the denominator.
You know we had a version of this in 2021. It was a little different. Our growth over market was 15% in 2021. We got asked a lot of questions. Is this, are you guys going to grow this fast above market forever now? We were very careful to caution, no, there are some unique things happening in the denominator of that calculation. Our customers or our take, at the time there were some semiconductor constraints, our technology's coming back faster than the broader market, right? So we are growing faster, but we're not changing our long-term outlook on growth over market. Clearly, at the end of 2023, that math went the other way. We had a couple of things. I know the numbers are the same in North America and China, but there's sort of two different things driving it.
In North America, you had the strike impact. We saw a significant impact in 2019 from the UAW strike as well. We're weighted towards the Detroit 3 in North America. It's about 65% of our business. So when their production slows down as a result of the strike, their relative mix to the North American market in a given quarter changes, right? So they're lower. So you know and we talked about this time, we were up 13% with the D3 and Q3. If you looked at the D3 production and our revenue growth, we were up 13%. We talked about this at the time on the quarter. Now, that's not how you calculate growth over market. Growth over market's on total vehicle production. But when we looked at it, we're certainly holding our share with the customers, but their production was lower because of the strike impact.
The other we think was somewhat unique in North America to 2023, the Japanese producers in, the Japanese production in North America came back very strong in 2023 after being relatively low in the back half of 2022. As the Japanese OEMs globally had to triage their semiconductor supply, they biased towards Japanese production. So by the time you got into 2023, inventory levels at Japanese dealers were very low. So you saw them get their chip supplies normalized and start to ramp production. So by the time you got to Q3, you had our customers, the Detroit 3, relatively lower. You had the Japanese relatively higher. And I think overall J3 production ended last year somewhere north of 20%. And that was about, call it two points of growth over market impact to us, right? Just the denominator effect of higher J3 relative to our customers.
As you look out to 2024, they're forecasted to be effectively flat from a production perspective. They've rebuilt inventories, and the J3 have started to normalize out. That is the forecast for their production. We don't have their schedules, and they're not on their content. We're using the same information that folks like yourself would use. But that's our current estimate in that North American growth over market. Now, you know, there are questions, and I think Rod, you've raised these of, well, what if that's indicative of a long-term market share trend where the Japanese are going to go 20 points higher than the D3? I think that's an interesting question. It's certainly one that can be asked. We don't see that in the production schedules, at least for 2024.
Our business in North America is about 75% weighted to the truck and SUV market. I think the Japanese have tried for years to take share in the meaningful share in the truck and SUV space from the North American. It hasn't been successful yet. But that's something I think for the future, fair that it bears watching, but not something we're seeing play out in the numbers today, which is why we have that reversal. China's different. China is going through an OEM mix shift amongst multinational JVs that are in China and their local OEMs. Some of their local OEMs are very strong. There's a lot of them. There's about 100, 100+ OEMs in China. We tend to concentrate on the top 10 or 15 of them.
That mix shift really came into play last year, particularly towards the last half of the year where you saw the locals significantly outproducing the multinational joint ventures. Our revenue mix today is 60/40, 60 multinational, 40% local. We've made tremendous progress on the local. If we were having this discussion back in 2017, 2018, we'd be closer to a 75/25 mix, multinational, local. So we've grown significantly with the locals. But we're still at a bit of an inflection point where the larger part of our business is flat to falling, the smaller part's growing. But we quite haven't hit that point yet. But we do think as that continues to move forward, our bookings over the last couple of years have been 50/50. So again, going back to our bookings discussion, we expect that revenue to continue to roll out.
And again, I'm not suggesting we change the Growth Over Market calculation. I understand it's used by a lot of folks, but one of the things we look at internally to understand our share, this is sort of again, Growth Over Market and after the fact calculation that anyone can do. What we look at internally to see how our business is growing is how are we doing with those customers? So last year with the top 10 or 12 Chinese OEMs, we grew well above 25% with those customers, right? So when we think about our product line, our ability to grow, the viability of our technology with those Chinese OEMs, we feel very good about that.
Now, again, relative to the total market, it's not yet showing up, but what we look at helps give us confidence in that growth and to some extent the growth over market starting to trend back towards that 6-8. If you think about, and then I'll stop. Sorry, I just want to make sure that, because for us, I think it's very important. I think Kevin and I were, we always thought we were clear, this is growth and this is growth over market. I think we have gotten a lot of questions where it's clear folks have conflated the two and we do think there's a difference. Both are important, but we do think there's a difference. So you know as we're looking out over the next year, next two years, feel very good about our mid-single-digit growth rate.
Based on what we're seeing from a forecasting service perspective, believe vehicle production to be flat. But again, you could have a risk where, and we'll obviously need to be talking about this, if you were to have those 100 OEMs in China that we deliberately don't do business with, either because they don't have very sophisticated vehicles, they don't buy our technology, or they're from a margin profile, not the kind of customers we want to do business with, if they were to have a significantly outpace the top 10 or 12 OEMs in a given quarter from a manufacturing perspective, our Growth Over Market in China will be impacted. That after the fact calculation will be impacted. We still may be growing 20% with our customer base. So I think that's part of the distinction.
I think just being a little bit more clear on and sort of forcing the discussion between, okay, we're going to talk adjusted growth and we're going to talk growth over market. They're sort of two different things. And I think for a lot of time they moved in the same direction. We've been using that calculation since we went public, right? For 11, 12 years ago. I think for a long period of time, those two were generally aligned and there have been impacts in 2023 that sort of disconnected those two, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I think it does. Look, there's risks, but there's this inherent growth within the company. I guess maybe to kind of sum it up, if I were to just say, let's assume, let's ignore the Growth Over Market concept because it complicates things, but let's say you grow 6%-7% per year and we include the $750 million of buybacks. Let's assume that happens again next year. It's really not that difficult with your margin targets to get to the low 7s in earnings next year, even with about $1.20 Motional losses. So mid 8s, earnings per share, something like that. Do you think that Aptiv stock trading at less than 10 times the ex-Motional number, do you think that the stock is cheap? And if so, why only 5 cents of accretion from buybacks? Why so modest in terms of the?
Yeah. Listen, obviously where I think, and I think a lot of folks have known Kevin and I for a period of time, we're not happy with where the stock is, obviously. We take that upon ourselves. We know we've got work to do to get back there. I think two different questions. One, we've put in the share buybacks back on this year. We had stopped them during COVID and supply chain disruption. If you look at our history between going public in 2011 and early 2020, we bought back over six, we returned over $6 billion of cash to shareholders while investing in these underlying technologies, while growing the business, while doing a creative M&A, right? We have a really good track record, I think, of doing both.
Certainly from a philosophical perspective, we are believers if we don't have good use for the capital, return it to the shareholders. I think we've demonstrated that. Took a break from that out during COVID and supply chain disruption, just given the need to see where the world was going and the requirement to have, you know, my view as CFO to have a little bit more cash on the balance sheet. We've now returned, we bought $300 million of shares, $400 million buyback in 2023, including $300 million in the fourth quarter. We've committed to buyback at least $750 million worth of stock in 2024.
At least.
At least 2024. Yeah.
That's a deliberate insertion.
That's my point. There is a, well, we talked about it. You know Kevin said it on the call. Could it be higher than $750? Yes. If we get towards the end of the year and we don't have a use for the cash on the balance sheet, fully appreciate at this multiple, M&A is obviously a little bit more complicated to do. And he said it on the earnings call. If we get to later in the year and don't have a use for the cash, would we expect to do more share buybacks? Certainly. From a guidance perspective, we've done 2 things. 1, we put $750 into the cash guide and we put $0.05 into the EPS guide. The reason we put the $0.05 in was a little bit to anchor the guide, right?
Because to some extent, buyback timing impacts how much EPS would flow when we do it. There are rules now as to how much a company can buy back on over a given period of time. There is math at the SEC. So we wanted to be mindful of all of that, the timing of the buybacks. So put a $0.05 placeholder in. But certainly if that $750 was to happen sooner in the year or if we were to do more, there's upside there. But I think the more important takeaway isn't necessarily whether it's going to be $0.05 or $0.06 or $0.07. It will be what it is based on the buybacks. But I think the philosophy, we believe the stock is not where it should be.
I think by the time we get to the beginning of Q4, even if it's just the 750, we'll have bought back on an LTM basis $1 billion worth of stock from the Q3 earnings call. We're going to generate a lot of cash. Our operating cash flow in 2023 was about $1.9 billion. We expect it to be about $2.3 billion in 2024. That's going to give us a lot of optionality.
What's the cash that you want to, you've got $1.6 billion on the balance sheet. We were looking at $1.2 billion of free cash flow, something like that. So you know what's the appropriate level of cash on the?
Running the business, we call it between $5 million and $800 million, which is up. We used to pre-COVID talk about around $500 million. We have bumped that up a little bit just given some of the newer complexities in the world.
Great. Well, I think we've run out of time. Joe, this was really great. Appreciate you taking the time.
I appreciate everybody's time. Thanks everybody.
It's terrific. Good seeing you again.