Today we have here Dana, leading provider of axles, driveshafts, structural and sealing and thermal management products. In the end markets where Dana plays are light vehicles, commercial, and off-highway. I'm happy to introduce to you the CEO, James Kamsickas. So I will start our conversation with one quick question on volumes and on the recovery. As we heard during our conference, volumes have picked up since the trough during the COVID years. But full-frame trucks, which is the main product that Dana is levered to, have remained pretty steady during the COVID years.
Mm-hmm.
So my question is, what do you see in the future? Do you see some incremental volume from full-frame pickup truck, full-frame trucks? How does that play into your profitability going forward?
Yeah, I'll take a quick shot at a good afternoon, everyone. So Jim Kamsickas, Chairman and CEO. Tim Kraus is our CFO. Real quick on the light vehicle-specific volumes, the way we see it, I mean, it's not by accident that, you know, we're in the truck business. We're not, largely speaking, in the passenger car business, if you didn't know that about Dana. So everything that's largely full-frame and up. And the volumes are good. I mean, they're good right now, and they're historically have been good, is the markets and the consumer and consumer interest has been more and more gravitating to trucks. So good line of sight in the truck programs for us. Our biggest programs are the Ford Super Duty, Bronco, Ranger, obviously the Jeep Wrangler, so on and so forth. And so going forward, those volumes are looking pretty solid.
Then, you know, I know you didn't ask this question, but there's been a lot of discussion throughout the day on the commercial vehicle volumes as well. Some see some pullback. In the ACT, there is some pullback. But, you know, we've done a pretty good job taking care of our customer and gaining some market share, which we see our sales being in pretty good shape going into the, throughout 2024.
And what do you see on the, so you first of all, you anticipated my follow-up on commercial .
Yeah.
What do you see in the off-highway market segment?
So, I'll take this one, and we'll go to Tim after that. But, you know, in the off-highway, good way to think about it, to compartmentalize it for where Dana participates is in the construction, agriculture, underground mining, and material handling side of the business. Agriculture, there's been some pullback on volume, but I got to be careful when I say pullback because, you know, they've been at relatively record years for a few years now. So we don't see any, like, significant, like, dramatic pullback, but more of a pullback in agriculture versus the others over the last couple of years.
Yeah, so switching to more on the cost side, so your margins have been under pressure over the last three years. And as we heard today, many suppliers talked about labor costs as a major issue because the inflation on those is faster than what we have seen historically. So how's the labor cost portion on the Dana cost structure right now? And what are you doing to mitigate these higher inflation on labor?
Yeah, I can take that one. So, we're seeing labor increases really across the globe at rates that we haven't really seen over the last 10 years to 15 years, you know. It's starting to moderate versus what we saw last year and in 2022. The main driver for us is really efficiency. And this is efficiency across all aspects of the business, whether it be on the plant floor through investments in cobots and robots in order to take some of the labor content out of the vehicle. And by the way, at the same time, increase throughput as well as the quality on the products.
And then as well on SG&A, R&D, really just trying to drive efficiencies in the business, you know, from top to bottom to try to offset or really regain some of that margin that's been lost over the last few years, through inflation, really, not just the labor but really all, all aspects of the business.
Could I jump in for one sec on volumes? I think you've done a fabulous job expanding the opportunities in EV. It's a good part of your backlog, and it's important to be in early. So maybe you could just share some of the strategies around EV in different segments of your business. There's a little bit of a pullback on the love for EV right now, but, you know, it kind of is gonna come and go, right?
Mm-hmm
It's here to stay. If you could just maybe give us some framework for how you're thinking about EV in your business?
Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, the one thing that's important to think about from Dana, because we're in those end markets, we may report as, you know, a commercial vehicle business, light vehicle business, off-highway business. But at the end of the day, we're a propulsion business, right?
Right.
Axles, drivelines, all sorts of things. So as we started the journey in electrification initially in 2016 and then in 2018, we went and picked off some boutique startup electrification companies, really inexpensively, to basically put that in-house to give us the capability not to go produce and or design, engineer, and produce motors, inverters, and e-axles, so on and so forth in an end market, but instead, instead, to be able to scale those across. So, you know, if you've looked at any of our recent earnings presentations or been part of it, you can see, for example, in the commercial vehicle segment, we do motors for Volvo. That was one of the ones we announced in February.
When you think about motors and everything that goes in there from a rotor, from a stator, from the software, and everything else associated with it, that's all scalable across the markets. So, you know, it can be in light vehicle and off-highway. So as we've gone we deploy capital, which for the most part, CapEx assets for capital equipment, we've been able to delay quite a bit of that, and we'll be able to continue to delay that if, in fact, the shift continues to go to the right, meaning the shift on volumes and the timing of launches. So, you know, we're very fungible in the capital across all these end markets. So as programs come and go, we'll be able to do that.
But the most important thing for us is, so you don't, like, as you mentioned just a second ago, you don't have the luxury of not participating today to be able to participate in five years, 10 years, 15 years, so on and so forth. And we've, in the way we've designed the business, it's flexible capital, so we'll be able to spread that across multiple end markets and multiple customers.
That's good.
And, so you mentioned about motors and inverters. So, at the current state, there are many competitors that are entering in the motor market. So, what differentiates Dana in that market segment? Why will an OEM choose to have Dana's motors?
Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks. So I think the best way at least, I, I hope it's the best way to illustrate. When you think about Dana, why has Dana been successful? This is our 120th year in the mobility supply industry. Because we've been very focused and very specialized in the truck business and above. It's not because other, other companies haven't wanted to get into the rigid full-frame truck business, right? If it was easy, they would have done it. It's not just a barrier to entry in capital. It's a capability. It's a knowledge base. It's an it's having worked together with fleets, with the dealers, with the end markets, and the use cases that are out there. Why do I say that? It's the same thing as it relates to motors and inverters.
We're not doing motors and inverters in those two examples. We also have other electrodynamic products. We're not doing motors for Class A passenger car, B, C, D, E, small two-speed type of motors. There's plenty of people that do that. We wish them all the luck in the world. Where our products are, they fit very much focused directly into the use cases that we have for our truck business and heavy equipment business. That's in the high voltages for the propulsion side for the most part. And then we have low-voltage products that are usually for the applications most often in off-highway. What's a visual for you?
If you were to go back to one of our more recent earnings decks, for example, you'll find, like, for Toro, we're not only doing the low-voltage motor that's propelling the vehicle, but it's also propelling the blade that goes with it. It's almost the same product. It's not the same product, but it's almost the same product. Scalability, very use case, and that's what differentiates us from trying to do motors and inverters for everybody. That's number one. The second thing, that's most important, the customers see great value and capability when they can go to one supplier that does not only the motor, the inverter, and the gearbox or axle but also the cybersecurity, the functional safety. And basically, they can go find one throat to choke if something doesn't come together.
Now, I try to do that a little tongue-in-cheek for fun, but reality, customers, OEMs from since the beginning of time, if they can have a single one-stop source.
Yeah.
To be able to have product in the field to ensure that its customers are going to be satisfied and they're going to get more sales, they're going to come to that supplier. We have that capability. We don't try to be more than what we are. We're never going to be a passenger-car guy. We're just gonna keep doing what we're doing in the truck business.
Yeah. So from your commentary, it seems like that electrification is happening both in light vehicles and commercial vehicles and off-highway. But from other supplier commentary, I would have expected that commercial, on-highway, and off-highway would have been slower in the adoption. What do you see actually there? So how do you see the pickup of electrification in those two market segments?
Yeah, I can take this one. You know, when we first started down the journey of this big shift to electrification, actually, the first end market we identified as being opportune place to invest was in commercial vehicle. And the reason for it is if it's not the Class 8 over-the-road truck, but think of last-mile delivery, the Amazon van that comes to, well, maybe my house every day. I don't know about yours, but you know, you think about it. It starts, and its duty cycle is known. It starts and ends at the same place every day. It has a known mass, right? That's an ideal application for an electrified vehicle because there isn't any range anxiety.
There isn't an issue on infrastructure 'cause that infrastructure is at the distribution center, not needed on the street corner like you would for perhaps a passenger car. So that was where we started. And then, you know, as you start to think about our multi-end market strategy, Jim, Jim mentioned this, you know, a minute ago, you know, the motors that are in the lower end of the commercial vehicle are also the same motors that size really well into the large end of the full-frame large truck business. And if you move the other way, the larger motors on commercial vehicle also have application into the larger end or the smaller end of the construction market.
So, you know, as we think about these markets, in like think off-highway, right? Material handling in a warehouse, that's all electrified product. Underground mining is all moving to electrification, quite quickly because of the ventilation issues with diesel engines. So there's a lot of different use cases. For us, you know, you hear about the pullback or the slowdown from a passenger or from a light vehicle perspective, and that's largely in passenger car, a place where we don't play, the place where we play in ICE and we will play in EV is in the large full-frame truck. That's electrifying at the latter part.
But we've already developed the capabilities and the products to apply in there and have the scale to be able to offer those customers the cost point that they need to be able to get those vehicles to be profitable.
So if we think about the inner business on the internal combustion engines, basically, you supply your axles. And we know that it's a mature market, right? So the electrification is basically the upside in terms of growth for your business. So if we try to separate the two end markets like ICE and EVs, how do your products differentiate between one market and the other? What's the upside to the ICE business?
I'm not sure the best way to answer this question, but I'll do my best. Hopefully, this helps. Dana was in 2016 $5.8 billion in revenue. Last year, I think we ended up at $10.6 billion.
We're adding to 10.9.
10.9. Yeah.
So, in certainty, there was some acquisition in there. Maybe you could put $1 billion, $1 billion something in there in revenue, but largely, it was cost, quality, delivery, technology. At the end of the day, any manufacturing company, maybe any company, it is a it is a you got to have the fundamentals, and you have to do it right, and you have to do it consistently. When you think about our business, the majority of our revenue that's gone up is ICE business because we either take share in some, some markets like commercial vehicle to a lesser degree. And off-highway, you can take share because there's some mixed programs, whatever.
Or as either customers have decided to invest and do more truck-like platforms, which we've all saw, or they just see the they see the brand power not just the brand power but the capability of Dana's products for them to be able to go sell more products. We have been able to be the benefactor of taking that growth. What is it? L ike 81% over really a short period of time, 81% or over seven years. So I would offer to you there's no reason that if you took a dot in 2016 and then put a dot in 2027, we wouldn't stay on that same trajectory because we don't try to be something that we're not. We just deliver cost, quality, and delivery as well as technology portfolio.
Electrification is three basically, you know, on the propulsion side is 3x content per vehicle of internal combustion engine. Our power technologies, our battery cooling, electronics cooling could be anywhere from 8x to 10x . That's kind of like cream on the top. If it happens, great. But we don't have to have it. We just keep doing what we're doing. We'll continue on that curve I just mentioned.
If we move to free cash flow generation, on this year, you have got it for, I think, $50 million free cash flow, right?
Mm-hmm.
What does it take to move that free cash flow higher? I don't know, 2025, 2026?
Yeah. I'll, I mean, I'll take this one. It's probably easy. So it's a combination. If you think about our cash flow this year, it is $50 million. It's being impacted by a couple of things that are a bit one-time in nature. So we are going to invest a bit in some restructuring. It's about $40 million. That's not going to repeat at the same level. Obviously, higher EBITDA flowing through. You know, depending on jurisdictional mix, taxes don't continue to rise at the same level based on EBITDA. And then the big driver, I think, is really getting, helping to drive the efficiency in working capital. So last year, we had a record number of new launches, over 100 launches. This year, we'll be back to our more normalized level of 50 to 60.
That combined last year with the UAW strike here in North America really did add a bit more working capital business. So I think as we start to unwind that working capital, we see the flow through from higher EBITDA and lower restructuring costs; we should see our ability to convert our sales into a higher level of free cash flow show up.
Once you will be at the ideal level of free cash flow, what are your initiative for capital deployment?
Yeah. So I think, you know, the first use really is to continue to delever the business. We'd like to see the business somewhere between 1x and 1.5x on a net leverage basis. And that'll be a combination of debt reduction and growth in EBITDA to make that happen. The rest of the cash flow, we'll continue to obviously invest in the business. We've got a lot of great opportunities ahead of us. And after that, you know, we'll go ahead and look at opportunities either in stock buybacks and the like to return some of that to the shareholder.
And what's your take on M&A? So I think that recently, you announced the divestiture of your hydraulics business. And in the past, you acquired smaller companies. So what's your approach to M&A? Are you more like focused on the technological point of view or like building scale where you don't have scale currently or?
Yeah. I think for M&A, most of the M&A has been centered over the last, you know, five, six, seven years in two areas, off-highway, and really building scale there, and getting technologies that really will help from an electrification perspective, and then core electrification capabilities. So, as Jim mentioned, we bought a number of electrical motor and inverter suppliers over the last few years. Those have now been integrated. So as we sort of look going forward. T here's no real, you know, hole or gap in the technology capability of the company. So we don't see any real need to focus free cash flow deployment in an M&A perspective.
There's a lot of really good growth opportunities organically within the business at this point that we're focused on and delivering for both our employees, our shareholders, and our customers.
Could I maybe circle back to the launches? 2023 was a pretty stellar year of launches. If you could talk a little bit about the most important launches that took place and also, you know, some of the pipeline you're looking for over the next year or two, something that we can kinda key on.
Yeah. I'll take a swing. You know, the maybe for this audience most interesting is the light vehicle. So two of the biggest programs we have in the company is the Ford Super Duty.
Yep.
So that was a cool launch because Ford's done, frankly, has done a spectacular job on that vehicle, and you know, they're doing very, very well with it. We had a flawless launch. The team did a spectacular job there. Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator, on a driveline standpoint, is refreshed last year. Refreshed sounds like soft words, but it was a lot of work to get it done across the family of plants that we go forward on. This year, there's a multiple of launches. Actually, we have some exciting launches. I'm trying to remember what we're putting in earnings deck, so I don't get ahead of myself here a little bit. I think for some of the products, let's jump around the world for a minute.
Commercial vehicle with DAF over in Europe, we're gonna be doing, you know, an e-transmission program with them. So, you know, and obviously, the European market's going to, we believe anyway, is moving a little bit faster on electrification, maybe the North America market. But again, the importance of that is more of a strategic standpoint as much as the dollars and cents because all that capability is yeah. It brings us the opportunity to move that technology around the world either in the exact same form with PACCAR elsewhere or some variant of that as with either in large commercial, in most cases, will be in the commercial vehicle market. But that product, in its own form and fashion, could evolve into light vehicle or into off-highway markets.
China's been a big discussion point, and there's lots of opportunity in China. You guys have been focused on China for a while. Just give me a little color on what we can think out of China and how you feel the market is.
Yeah, actually, for a lot of reasons, we're certainly in China across all of our business units, so on and so forth. But from a proportion standpoint, it's a very small market for us.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know. Maybe it's directionally. I think we've publicly said this. I think it's directionally 5% of our sales or something like that. So for us, it's kind of steady as you go, not a lot of exposure one way or the other. And, you know, it's slower. It's slower there, I would say that, but it's not material to our earnings.
So steel is one of the major input costs for axles manufacturing. We saw some deflation from the peak. So how are you managing the input cost in your conversation with the OEMs?
Mm-hmm.
Have you seen more indexation of your costs, or you just negotiate every time that you launch a new program?
So for commodities, I think, you know, when we think about the inflationary costs, we tend to separate. We do separate commodities. So think of core metals that are inside the product from labor, conversion costs, energy, and the like. On the commodity side, and of course, it differs by customer and by end market. But generally speaking, we have contractual indexation with the vast majority of our customers that provide for about, and again, it differs by end market and customer, about 75% direct pass-through on the change in the commodity indexes. And those have been in place for a very long time, and they've worked extremely well through the disruptive period over the last couple of years. So that's generally on a lag.
So we generally see the decrease in commodity costs coming through our purchased material earlier. And generally, three to six months lag, we either recover that or have to provide the pricing reductions back to the customer. And again, about 75%. So generally, on the way up, you know, earnings and margin are compressed as we pay higher input costs and are delayed in getting recovery. And of course, we only get recovery for about 75%. And then, of course, that reverses as those prices recede. So right now, we're kind of in a, you know, steel is, has sort of it's probably down a little bit now, we're seeing, but more or less staying constant, down from its peaks.
We're starting to give back some of that to the customers, which is why you see if you looked at our walk, you know, we're seeing a bit of a top-line sales reduction, but not all of that flowing back through the bottom line, generally speaking, because of the lag and the 75%. But those mechanisms work very, very well, really across all the end markets and customers.
Yes. Yeah. So at the top, top-line level, we saw a decent amount of pricing across your, your segments. In that pricing, it I would assume that that pricing environment is kind of fading given that the inflation pace is slower than before. So will we see again the level of price down that you had historically, like 2%, 1.5% down?
Let me take that. I mean, at a high level, good question. At a high level, I don't know that the 2% is the right kind of baseline for maybe the audience to think about across some of the markets. But when you're in the high-capital-intensity business like us, we don't see those type of percentages that we have to navigate through. I'm not going to get quoted directly on it, but it's something lower than that. And, you know, with our playbook of waste elimination and cost reductions throughout our company, with our supply base, internal operations, efficiencies, etc., we're generally able to offset that.
Moving to your backlog. Doug asked about China. From what I remember, your backlog is evenly weighted on all the major regions, right? So I would assume that your plan for the future is to diversify more on a geographical standpoint. Are you trying to gain share in geographies outside North America and across customers that you haven't dealt with so far?
Yeah. I would tell you maybe, maybe it's not even the right way to think about it, but this is my, I don't know, 18th year as a CEO of a mega supplier. And I don't really see it as a major focus of which region to be in. That's, that's secondary to me, because largely speaking, not every piece of capital, but a large portion of our capital that if we need to move our, our actual capital equipment, you can move it around. So you just have to be positioned for to be able to win wherever your customers are going to be in a product that we have. I mean, you're not gonna ship drivelines around the world. You're going to basically build where you sell. So we don't really look at so much on a geographical basis.
We tend to, you know, get recurring and grow a little bit in each region, no different than we do as a total company.
Okay. Staying on the backlog. So, 3/4 of it was based on EVs, electrified products. But I think you quote your backlog on a net basis. So, I would assume that you remove some of the programs that are getting, I don't know, let's say, canceled. But what would be your gross backlog otherwise?
Well, we don't look at gross backlog. So, I don't want to confuse the messaging. So we do always quote our backlog on a net of loss basis. The easiest way to think about our backlog is if you hold currency, volume, market, and pricing constant, you should be able to take our last year's sales and just simply add the backlog, and you would arrive at the next year's sales level. Now, obviously, that doesn't happen because we've got commodities and FX and market dynamics that play in there. But that's how to think about that number. And so it truly reflects the net increase in program sales that we're gaining.
If you think about much of our new business growth is not coming at this point at a large expense on the ICE side. It's a little bit on PT because as in the thermal and sealing side, as engine production starts to move down, we're losing a bit of the ICE sales there. But most of the EV growth is incremental today, both in CV and in off-highway. I'll give you a great example. So in our last earnings release, we talked about an electrified piece of material handling equipment where we're providing the integrated drive system. So that's a piece of electrification business for us. It's completely incremental for our off-highway segment. That product was not an ICE product yesterday for the OEM.
It's been electrified for the last 40 or 50 years.
Historically, we did not have a product to sell to those customers. Those are the customers that we sell other product to. But we didn't have an electrification product for them. Now we do, and it's better than what they've been buying. And so we've added those sales. Those would count as backlog, and they count as electrification sales. But they don't come at an expense of anything that we're currently selling because it's completely incremental business. And we see that quite a bit across all of the end markets. Now, as we move through the growth curve and our light vehicle programs begin to electrify, you'll start to see a trade-off between the ICE version and an EV version.
But again, as Jim mentioned, our, if we're providing an ICE axle and a fully integrated E-axle, that E-axle is generally 3x or 3+x the content. So we'll still see a net sales increase even as we think about that change in the backlog and the mix between ICE and EV.
What's the incremental margin on that, E-axle, that you just mentioned?
So we expect that our incremental margins on our EV business that they will be in line with what our traditional margins are in the ICE versions of those products. The thing you have to realize is that with 3x the sales content, there'll be more dollars of EBITDA that'll be flowing from those programs because most of those programs are fully vertically integrated. So we're making the hard parts, the inverter and the motor, in many of those cases so that contribution flows through on the full value chain.
So how that would change in case that the motor is not supplied by you?
Well, it will depend. You know, if it's not supplied by us, then it'll either be purchased or provided by the OEM on a consignment basis. So it will depend on the application and the OEM, in terms of how they're structured and how they want to go about. So it's hard to say today exactly, but we have even today in, think about it in light vehicle, we have directed content today that we manage. This wouldn't be any different than what we do today with many of our light vehicle customers.
Is there any question from the audience? Yeah. So, another question would be, so today, we talked about hybrids. In your view, and so far, our conversation was between ICE and full EVs. How do hybrids impact your growth and margin perspective in the future?
It's a net positive. I mean, I'm sure if, as you mentioned, you must have been coming up earlier in the discussions. But, you know, it's basically you still have the engine. You still have a transmission, but you still, at the same time, need a motor, and you need an inverter. So it's incremental content to the vehicle. So as far as we're concerned, the more hybrids, the better. But the most important thing you can take away from Dana is we don't care. We are the definition of energy source agnostic. If they want to give us a request for quote or an RFQ, as they call it in the business, we don't care. We're going to be capable of being able to be competitive in that. We'll win our share. We won't win our share.
But, as I've said my whole career, I only want to win one in every three programs 'because you're always going to have two competitors in the business. We'll hopefully, you know, if more of the trend goes more to hybrid, let's do it.
I thought about the off-highway for a bit.
Sure.
It's a super amazing business that I think people follow a little bit less than the light vehicle side, from a, you know, academic standpoint. But it's high margin. And if you look at the growth and infrastructure we're gonna maybe have, let's talk a little bit about, I mean, why aside from the EV, just, just generally the guts of that business.
Mm-hmm.
What type of growth you're thinking, you know, what type of margins you may have in that, what are some of the opportunities in that 'cause that's been a leadership business for a long time?
Yeah. You know, so where to start? Let me at least get some momentum behind it a little bit.
Yeah.
So that business when I started Dana, I think, in 2015, right. I t was very obvious to me that with the capability we had in-house, we were like a $900 million business or something in 2016 or whatever. You know, today, I think it's like a $3.1 billion business. We did some inorganic and a lot of organic growth to go do that. And then we, you know, we obviously penetrate in, like, the four markets I already said, within the off-highway. Where does that business go from here? I mean, we're, we sell to every customer. You start everything starts with the customer, right? Without a top line, there's no bottom line. We sell to every major off-highway what we call anyway off-highway OEM out there.
The ones you're most familiar with, of course, are the John Deeres and the Caterpillars and AGCO and Fendt and you name it around the world. As we're with them, you know, the growth opportunity is not only anywhere we do transmissions in the off-highway business, axles, prop shafts, whatever, but they, too, are coming up the curve, albeit slower, in that less volume. There's the growth trajectory there is just as good. In many cases, it can be instead of if you did a reference number of if we said 3x content per vehicle and commercial vehicle and light vehicle because there's more what we call motion products and a way to think about that, like, a slew drive, like a bucket that might turn on a vehicle, so on and so forth.
The capabilities we bring with that or the product portfolio we bring with that now would take our content per vehicle from maybe 1 to instead of 1 to 3, 1 to 5, 1 to 6, so on and so forth. So it's penetration with customers. It's our global footprint. And then, of course, what I already said was the content per vehicle.
That's great.
Talking about insourcing and outsourcing of the components, so you mentioned earlier about rotors for your motors. What do you actually produce in-house, and what do you outsource to other players in the market?
Just in motors and inverters, or?
A n entire E-axle, for example.
So we do all of it, you know, all of it in-house. But we don't, like, for example, we'll do the software and controls and everything that feed into, like, the PCB board. The easiest way to think about it, we don't make our own PCB boards, right? One other thing you might hear a lot. I don't know what you heard earlier today, but a way to think about the inverter, the most important most expensive component within an inverter is what they call a power module. Some of that we're vertical on. Some of it, we outsource. So it all depends on the given circumstance. That's, you know, any gray. I'm not saying we are. I'll let you judge.
But in any great manufacturing company has to have a swinging gate in being able to make the trade-offs into when to what when to be vertical and when not. And we do it down to the component level.
Yeah. And so going back to the backlog, so, in your backlog calculation, I would assume that some of the losses that we were talking about before are made by some ICE programs that were about to basically roll off. Given that the EV market is slowing down, and it seems to be slower, are some of those products likely to come back online and get back into your backlog?
Yeah. If I understand your question directly, you know, on the ICE side of the business for our PT, if you think about our, if by segment anyway, light vehicle, commercial vehicle, off-highway, I can't think of a program that we've lost. What Tim was referring to is in our power technologies, which is sealing and thermal business, there have been some engines, for example, that have gone out of production over time. So we've lost some sealing gaskets, so on and so forth. But I mean, in the whole scheme of things, it really, really immaterial. And it comes back to the math of why the curve has been straight up on the growth trajectory for Dana over the last eight years. We're really not losing business.
Okay. So on competition, so what you're primarily levered on, at least in the light vehicle business, on Ford. And what's your approach on winning business at other OEMs, when you have other very strong competitors, for example, axles that play in that niche?
Yeah. I mean, everybody's going to be. I t's a good question, by the way. Everybody's gonna be larger or smaller with every OEM. We sell to all of them. I mean, we've been, you know, supplier of the year at General Motors for five years running up until last year. And then, you know, Ford is our biggest, but they happen to be our biggest. Stellantis is a big customer. JLR's a big customer. Volkswagen's a big customer. To me, it just comes down to I just want a 1/3 of the business, right? Let somebody else get the other 2/3. We'll get our share. But that's how we think about it. We sell to everybody. There's nobody that we're boxed out from.
What prevents you to get into the unibody type of frame, type of vehicle rather than just full-frame?
Good question. We do some of that, some of that product. We do some for if you think about, like, the Ford Edge, so on and so forth. So we have some capability in there. But I think it's also very important, one, from a capital allocation, human allocation. But don't try to be everything to everybody. So we, you know, in terms of where we focus and where we think we differentiate, more importantly, where we help our customers differentiate is really more on the full frame. That's why.
Okay. And, you have a question, Doug ?
I just have a quick question about the level of automation from a percentage basis over the last 10 years that you've been there and how much that's helping you. Of course, there's the costs to the technology, and then there's margin that accretes over time. But just get a sense of that. And also, does that impact the overall employee base, or how does that change the employee dynamic between, say, sales, engineers, leadership, so on and so forth? Just curious about the level of automation that you're experiencing these days.
Great question. A question I never got before. That's a good one.
I don't know that I can give you a percentage of automation, kind of a start to finish or, you know, nine years at Dana, we're in. But it's certainly one of our main swim lanes, I would call it, that we focus on, and we make sure that we add to the pile every year. Let me start there. Second, when you think about the products that we have, in large part, you have to have automation. You now have people that are picking up full axles, especially when you think about, like, off-highway axles or, transmissions, and same thing across commercial vehicle. The best way for me to answer it, in a playbook of basically getting more efficient as a company, there's a lot of things you have to do.
Automation is a very big part of it. We do a lot of it. If you think about just last year, our incrementals on incremental sales, we leveraged it. I think it was 41%, Tim. Does that sound about right?
Yeah. Sorry.
41% on our incremental sales. I mean, historically, Dana was maybe at 20% or something like that. Maybe that's similar to some of the other peer group companies. And that's just through a constant tenacity. I mean, just really getting after it every, every single swim lane we have in the company. Automation is a large one. But back to your point on employment, you know, we do that. But still, no matter what seemingly, no matter where we're at around the world because we have the growth trajectory, and we're winning all the new programs and doing what we're doing, it's really more of a redeployment of our associates around the company or within the plants to somewhere else to get utilized. Certainly, there's some layoffs here and there.
But all in, when you got a sustained growth pattern, what you do is you get the automation in place, and then you redeploy your human capital, which is what we've been doing.
I think that wraps us up. Jim, Tim, thanks so much for great presentation, great discussion. If we have any questions, just feel free to connect with me or John Murphy or Federico or anyone on the management team.
Okay. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, guys.