All right, good morning and welcome everyone to the PHINIA presentation. Thanks to the PHINIA team for joining us today. I'm going to turn it over to them for a presentation, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Take it away.
Great, thank you very much, and thanks for joining us today. I'm Brady Ericson, CEO. I'm joined by, with me, Chris Gropp, our CFO, and Kellen Ferris, our VP of IR. Thank you very much for joining us. We'll try to go through this presentation relatively quickly and then hopefully have some good Q&A as well. Obviously, a lot of forward-looking statements, but just to give you kind of a quick overview, where we ended 2024, about a $3.4 billion company. Really diverse around the world, across different product lines and markets, along with some very strong brands as well. I think this is one of the things that I think is really interesting about our business as well, is the diversification of our business.
You'll see there as far as end markets, light commercial vehicle and kind of medium-heavy-duty commercial vehicle and off-highway accounting for about 39% of our revenues. Next up is our independent aftermarket and our service business at 34%, and then our light passenger vehicle OE business is around 27%. Serving a lot of different markets, which gives us a lot of resiliency as well. From a regional diversification, you know, Europe and America is about equal in scale and size. Asia a little bit smaller. Just as an FYI, that, you know, we don't consolidate a joint venture that we have in India. They would actually balance that out a little bit better. From a customer standpoint, as you'll see there, you know, we have one customer that's over 10% with GM, but then our top five really only accounts for 40% of our revenue.
We have a lot of diversification, you know, around the world and with our customer base. We see a lot of opportunities for us to continue to grow and leverage our existing capabilities into new markets and continue to expand them into aviation and alternative fuels. From an overall footprint standpoint, you also see a pretty strong footprint in a lot of low-cost economies or best-cost countries spread around the world. Our overall philosophy is that we design, develop, produce, source, validate, and sell within region, which is why, you know, Asia is predominantly for Asia, Europe for Europe, and Americas for Americas, as we try to minimize the amount of freight and transport that we have kind of around the world as well. This keeps us relatively isolated from a lot of the chaos that is going on right now. I jumped a couple.
From an overall product portfolio standpoint, you know, we've got a good product portfolio of fuel products, starters and alternators, and canisters for the commercial vehicle and industrial sectors. Light vehicle as well, a good portfolio of similar products, and a lot of synergy from a manufacturing and design capability across both light vehicle and commercial vehicle. We'll see a lot of overlap in product there. Obviously a big focus for us as we move towards carbon neutrality and carbon-free fuels is a lot of work that we are doing with alternative fuels with customers, whether it's direct injection hydrogen, LNG, CNG, ethanol, and a lot of different applications. From that product standpoint, we also then provide complete systems and integration for our customers as well. That will include our engine control units, calibration services, development, diagnostics, capabilities.
To give you an order of magnitude, we actually receive nearly $100 million a year in what we call non-recurring engineering expenses that are paid by our customers for those services and integration support. Obviously, all of those product lines from an OE perspective are then supported by and expanded with our aftermarket segment at that bottom as far as the foundation. Not only do we sell a lot of our OE products and our plants produce those for aftermarket for fuel systems and starters and alternators, but we will then enhance that with other maintenance solutions, steering, braking, suspension, diagnostics, and vehicle electronics and sensors that will support our customers as we build out that overall aftermarket business. We are going to market as product leaders, you know, ensuring that we are developing technology that our customers are willing to pay a premium for.
It's not innovation for innovation's sake. We are trying to be a good partner of choice for our customers and continue to invest there. We think with our diverse markets that we serve and the products that we're developing, we see that along with product leadership being able for us to develop stable growth over the long term. Obviously, there are going to be some cycles, and we're in a down cycle now on light vehicle and CV. As the cycles come back, we think that's going to allow us to have steady growth, you know, across our businesses throughout the decade. We'll continue to be financially disciplined. We look at every single opportunity and apply the same minimum hurdle requirements, whether it's commercial vehicles, light vehicle, or aftermarket. We'll have those minimum economic value targets that we have.
We think by really focusing on economic value and year-over-year value creation and cash flow, we think that's going to drive total shareholder returns that are positive and over the long term. Just to give a couple kind of examples of our disciplined capital allocation, we're going to continue in our first focus is not only supporting our business and organic growth, but it's also maintaining strong liquidity and a strong balance sheet in order for us to weather any difficult times that may be ahead, as well as allow us to be opportunistic when opportunities do come up. We have a strong balance sheet that will allow us to go after targets as needed.
From a competitive capital allocation and return standpoint, as you'll see there, you know, we've already purchased within the last four quarters over 16% of our outstanding shares, as well as provided dividends, you know, to our shareholders as well. A lot of money has been going back, you know, to our shareholders because up until now, and still now, as we think, you know, purchasing our shares has been a very good deal and it's undervalued, and therefore we think that's the best way to maximize shareholder returns. We're going to continue to be ROIC focused and EV focused in our decisions, and we see a lot of growth areas for us, both on alternative fuels, that system integration that I mentioned, as well as an addressable market in CV and off-highway industrial and aerospace that's probably the same size as our current on-highway commercial vehicle market.
Obviously we see aftermarket as a really strong, consistent grower and cash flow generator for us as well. We are going to continue to be disciplined in looking at M&A. Again, we are going to compare any new M&A with kind of where our multiple is right now, and we will decide whether it makes more sense to do an acquisition or to buy back our shares. Again, we are always going to look at that as a way that we want to maximize shareholder value. Going out and doing an acquisition that is going to be a similar asset and paying eight or ten times does not make a lot of sense when we are trading at five. We are going to continue to be disciplined in that respect moving forward. Just a few accomplishments I would like to kind of highlight.
I think 2024 was a really good year for us of transition and actually delivering some really good solid results. We launched a lot of new technologies, whether it's hydrogen 500 bar systems, as well as kind of a cost-effective direct injection systems for off-highway applications leveraging our GDI technology. Some really interesting technologies that we're seeing a lot of pull from other customers on. Strong financial performance, really strong cash flow generation. I think what's also key is we actually refinanced our TLA and TLB debt in 2024, both with a secured and unsecured offering. Those went really, really well. I think investors in the bond markets really are recognizing that this is a stable cash-generating business. Actually our secured debt that we did first is at a little bit higher rate than our unsecured debt that we did six months later.
That is just a testament to how much confidence the bond community has in us and how it has been improving since we have spun. Going forward into 2025, you know, we are going to continue to try to be that consistent and boring operator that is going to have strong operational performance, preserving our balance sheet and our liquidity, and being disciplined in our capital allocation. We do have some exciting opportunities as we continue to get our quality certification and launch some of our first aerospace opportunities. We are continuing to add, you know, thousands of new part numbers to our aftermarket offering. We see new opportunities to grow our CV and off-highway segment as well. There is some good growth ahead of us and some good opportunities for us.
Now just looking quickly, I think hopefully you guys have seen this in our deck that just came out, but just to kind of highlight, you know, Q1 was a bit softer, I think, than people were expecting, but it was roughly in line with where we thought sales were going to be. We knew, you know, coming into the quarter, we had some softness in Q3 and Q4 last year. Some customers kind of took their time coming back in Q1 and seeing some of the softness as they tried to readjust some of their inventory levels. We think Q1 is going to be one of our softer quarters. I think the segments overall performed very well with about a 12.2% segment operating margin. Aftermarket was above kind of their normal targets at 16.1%.
Fuel systems came in a little bit light, just below 10, which was, you know, primarily driven by revenues and both had a little bit of impact of tariffs in the quarter of about $4 million. As you see there, $100 million returned to shareholders through repurchases, another $11 million of dividends. Again, strong performance, good capital allocation, and we continue to have strong liquidity and cash on hand. Although things moved around a little bit, we actually reaffirmed our original guide. Sales still in that $3.2 million-$3.4 million range, EBITDA still strong as well. Things moved around a little bit in the fact that, you know, with tariffs that had primarily an effect on our North American volume expectations. With volume coming down in North America, we adjusted our light vehicle expectations as well as our commercial vehicle volume expectations in North America.
That was a headwind, but that's going to be offset by some of the tariff pass-through, as well as some of the FX headwinds being less than we originally expected. We originally expected it to be about an $80 million headwind in 2024, or it should be in 2025. And now we're expecting it only to be about $20 million. We're expecting about $40 million-$50 million of tariff pass-through and offset that with volume. So it kind of puts us all kind of right back in the middle of our guide. There is a little bit of, I mean, obviously on the tariff pass-through, there's no margin associated with it, which is about a $5 million or $6 million headwind.
We see other areas of our business that we can offset that both with a higher aftermarket mix, as well as some self-help and some cost controls that we put in place to try to maintain these numbers as well. Tax rate remains a little bit high. Guide is still there. I think in Q1, if you take out the $7 million that is actually pre-spin related, that actually is going to be paid by our former parent of about $7 million. Our adjusted tax rate came in at about 36% in Q1. The team is making some progress. It's still going to take a few years to get down sub 30%. I think we've got a really good plan to kind of get there, and we'll start to see some of those benefits in the next year or two.
With that, we'll open it up for Q&A.
All right, thanks. Good summary there. Maybe at this time, I can remind the audience listening, if you do have any questions for the PHINIA team, to please use the chat function. I can relay those here from my side. As we wait for those to come in, maybe I can start with the first one. Just wanted to see if you could, you mentioned tariffs. Wanted to see if you could discuss the key fundamentals of tariffs and how that impacts your business, your production mix versus your sales mix, and impacts on near-term customer ordering patterns. You talked about your ability to pass through on price, but wondering if you can expand on that a bit.
Yeah, I mean, primarily our North American business, it's primarily, there's about $1 billion of manufacturing and revenues that are generated out of Mexico, both from an OE and an aftermarket, you know, sales standpoint. About half of that stays in Mexico, and we ship directly to our customers in Mexico. And another 60% of that remaining is USMCA compliant. That kind of gets us down to maybe that $200 million of revenue that is non-USMCA compliant that we actually ship into the U.S. market. That's the one that's seeing, you know, a good portion of the 25% tariffs that we're seeing. There's some other puts and takes. There's some supplier impacts that we're seeing as well that are, you know, high single-digit millions.
There's about, I think it's around $10 million or so that we purchase from China for aftermarket business as well that's also seeing some of the impact. Those are kind of like the big buckets. From an aftermarket perspective, you know, the bulk of our customers are distributors. Those are ones that we can quickly pass through price increase, you know, relatively quickly. We've already had the first price increase that we rolled through in mid-April. The team is getting ready for the next round of price increases that go into effect here in the next month or so to accommodate the second round. We're able to pass those through relatively quickly.
On the OE side, we've been working with the OEs for the last couple of months to ensure that we have proper documentation, and they've started some of their audit processes to show that, you know, what we're paying is what we're passing through. We already have several settlements with some customers for 100% pass-through. There's a few of them that we're still working through and going through audit that we expect to finalize here yet in Q2 and book in Q2. There may be a little bit of noise and lumpiness. They may agree, but they may not reimburse us until Q3. There may be a little bit of lumpiness as we saw in 2022 and 2023. We fully expect to get recovery in totality, just maybe a little bit of timing effect.
There any impact on the ordering patterns for that piece of sales that you produce in Mexico and ship to the U.S.?
No, we really haven't seen, you know, the EDIs continue or kind of the order board that we get from our customers and their forecasts is still kind of hanging in there. Haven't seen any significant impacts other than, you know, with the latest S&P guide on volumes that we're now tied to. In general, you know, things are looking consistent for us to continue to hit our guide.
To be clear, what S&P has come out with, we don't really see so far in our orders. That is just anecdotal of what we see out there and that we're assuming will likely come, but we haven't seen it yet, any of the orders or forecasts.
Gotcha. Okay. In your guidance, you talked about an expectation for $5 billion in sales by 2030. Could you talk to us about the split between organic and inorganic growth you see in the pursuit of that goal? You know, what secular trends and investments are fueling on the organic side and on the other side, the characteristics of what you look for in your M&A strategy?
Sure. I think from 2021 through 2030, we expect that organic to be in that 2%-4% range. We're probably a little bit on the low side of that right now, just from the cycles that we're in. We think when the cycle kind of comes back, we'll get back in that 2%-4% organic. That's kind of broken down into three different pieces. We expect our light passenger vehicle and our light vehicle to be basically flat revenue through that time period. We're continuing to pick up market share in that space, but the overall kind of ice engine production for light vehicle will continue to decline over the decade. Our goal there is to continue to pick up market share to keep those lines kind of full and keep our revenue flat through the decade.
As we look into our commercial vehicle, off-highway, aerospace, and other industrial applications, we expect that to be in the 2%-4% range, both from kind of the CV market, on-highway market, seeing a little bit of growth, but also a large addressable market with the industrial off-highway and aerospace that we're really not in right now. It is a $5 billion, $6 billion TAM that we're starting to grow into, and that is going to support growth of that segment in the 2%-4% range. We expect our pure aftermarket business, as we continue to add more part numbers, gain more share, share our wallet with our customers, and they have consistently seen good solid growth the last couple of years, we expect them to continue to grow in that 3%-6% range. That averages out to about 2%-4%.
That should get us to about roughly that $4.3 billion number organically. With our cash flow generation, continued focus on, you know, smart capital allocation, we think we can still support, you know, about $700 million of revenue to be acquired, you know, in that time period and still continue to return, you know, money to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases and remain balanced. We're starting to see some of those opportunities really start to come to fruition where, you know, their asking multiples are consistent with kind of where we are. We think they may be, you know, good opportunities for us to add to our portfolio and provide us additional growth in the long term.
Great. Thank you. You own a strong Delphi brand, which you lever for your aftermarket sales. Can you talk to us about the importance of strong brands when you have discussions with customers?
Yeah, I think in many ways, that's why we have relatively little or few kind of white label or white box type business, because many of our consumers and distributors see that Delphi brand as a premium brand, and it's easy for them to sell their customers, saying when they see the Delphi brand on it, they're like, "Yeah, I'm getting OE quality. I know it's going to be a good part. I'm not going to need to worry about it failing anytime soon." Even the technicians that are installing it, they have confidence that's not going to come back and have to get replaced, and it's going to cost them labor hours. We have a very good strong brand.
We've got the OE pedigree, and we also do a lot of work of working with the technicians on how to service the product, promoting our product, supporting them with videos and training, not just around our own products, but around the vehicle in general, of how to deal with hybrids, disconnects. We perform a lot of certification programs at our training centers as well. We're getting a lot of pull from those, you know, technicians as well. When they see that, you know, that Delphi box on the shelf, they'll immediately kind of go and grab that one because they have confidence in it and it working and performing well for the customer.
Okay, great. I just want to remind the audience again, if you do have a question to put that in the chat, and I can see that we do have a question from the audience, if I'll just repeat that now. You mentioned a JV in India. Can you please elaborate who is the partner? What is the sales today and what sort of potential you see in the next three to five years? Also in India, EV penetration is much higher than other markets. How do you mitigate that risk in coming years?
EV penetration rate in India is actually quite low. China, it may be a lot higher, but this is in India. India is, they're doing still a lot with gasoline and maybe more natural gas. EV penetration or pure battery electric is still relatively low. There may be a lot of hybrids and hybrid applications, but not many battery electric vehicles. The joint venture, if you look at our 10K or 10Q, you'll see it in there. We have a, it's a non-consolidated joint venture, even though we own 52.5%. And it's with the TVS Group. So it's kind of named as DTVS or Delphi TVS based on the legacy. They're in the $2 million, $250 million in revenue with good strong growth.
They're expanding also into tractors and other applications and see a good strong pipeline of, you know, opportunities in that market, especially in commercial vehicle and off-highway applications. Light vehicle diesel in India used to be, you know, a large portion of the revenues. It's really come down significantly. Our joint venture partner, who's only focused on diesel products, has been growing into the tractor and entering into new markets. They've done a nice job there. We do have one of our own wholly owned locations in India as well, as well as a tech center. Our plants are responsible for kind of everything other than diesel. Gasoline applications, GDI, natural gas, hydrogen, that's all in the responsibility of our wholly owned entity. The joint venture is purely diesel.
All right, interesting. Another one here from the audience for Brady about the increase in the change of control payout. Just wondering what the catalyst for that change was.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually just going back to what I had before. For some reason, prior parent decided to change it from three to two upon spin. And the board decided, "Hey, we may want to kind of put that back to what it was originally.
Okay, maybe back over to your free cash flow. Obviously, pretty healthy. You talked about M&A earlier, but perhaps you could expand on your capital allocation strategy and priorities and what you see in the near term as maybe a tier chart.
You know, I mean, for us, the key is maintaining a strong balance sheet and liquidity and supporting organic growth initiatives. You know, that's going to be number one. Number two is going to be ensuring we protect our dividend as well and giving, you know, cash back to our shareholders directly. The third bucket is going to be, do we buy back our shares or do we make acquisitions? You know, again, we're going to, each quarter, we sit down with the board, we take a look at our stock price, we take a look at what we think is fair value of our stock price and compare that to some of the M&A that we have in the pipeline and kind of decide, "Hey, you know, do we buy back more shares?
Do we hold off because we have an M&A coming? Before we decide on an acquisition, you know, as I mentioned, we're not going to do an acquisition that's similar to our current business and pay, you know, a much higher multiple than what our stock is currently trading at. Our goal is to try to get our multiple up to where we think is closer to fair value, and that may then open up, you know, additional opportunities from an acquisition standpoint as well. Those are kind of laying out the priorities, and I think we'll continue to be, you know, extremely financially disciplined as we have our, you know, our own incentives as an organization. From a cash incentive standpoint, we're focused on, you know, creating economic value on a year-over-year basis. It's not to budget or a forecast.
We have to create value on a year-over-year basis in order to get that payout. The other part of our cash payout is cash. We have to continue to deliver strong cash flow. If we do that, you know, we then get a bonus. For our longer-term incentive, it is all TSR. We are trying to align ourselves and our bonus structure very well with our investors as well and saying, "Hey, if our stock's doing well, we're delivering and creating value on a year-over-year basis, generating good cash flow, that should turn into strong share price appreciation and also some good returns for our employees as well with our bonuses and stock grants.
All right, thank you. I don't see any other questions from the audience, so maybe I have one more from myself. You guys talked about commercial vehicles. You talked about aerospace as new and expanding markets. Wondering if you could describe what you see as PHINIA's right to win in these markets and how you see that growing in the near and medium term.
Yeah, again, what we're looking at is we're a precision fluid management company. You know, we have such tight tolerances, especially when we start talking about commercial vehicle. You know, we're talking about fuel injection pressures that are going upwards of 3,000 bar. To convert that to folks, think of 45,000 PSI. You know, in our tires, there's what, 40, 45 PSI? We're talking about 45,000 PSI that's going through our injectors and fuel pressures. We're also talking about parts that then have to go, you know, moving up and down, you know, tens of times within a second during that pilot injection and full injection process for those applications. The amount of control that we have and the speed at which these things are moving is absolutely phenomenal. These are tolerances that we're holding plus or minus half a micron in high volume production.
Half a micron is just larger than a coronavirus. We're talking really, really small. Actually, when we start talking to some of our aerospace customers and we kind of explain to them what our capabilities are, they kind of put their hands up and say, "We don't need that type of control." They're actually seeing us, the capabilities that we have, the fact that we have SEM microscopes and our quality systems that we have in there meet or exceed what they're needing. They see us as a reliable, well-funded supplier. They're dealing with a lot of challenges in that space. That's kind of on the aerospace side that we're starting to pick up a lot of momentum with them.
That is why we really started to push forward to get our aerospace qualification and put in a lot of things in preparation for those launches. That is why we are starting to pick up some additional customers who are coming in and doing audit processes. On the off-highway side, I think one of the things that is changing is some of the tier four and tier five emissions are coming to that off-highway application. They are going from 20, 30-year-old, you know, injection systems. Now, in order for them to meet the new tier four and tier five emissions, they need to go to more of a common rail direct injection system. We are leveraging a lot of our capability and we are helping them on the off-highway side achieve their off-highway emissions and fuel economy actually with some of our GDI technology.
We've actually leveraged our GDI technology, converted those gasoline direct injection to diesel direct injection at a much lower pressure at 350 bar. From a cost perspective, it's something they can afford. It gives them a nice way to improve their fuel economy at a reasonable price without having to go to the medium or heavy-duty side that's looking at 2,000-3,000 bar pressures and whose systems are, you know, four or five times more expensive than a GDI type system.
All right, Brady, Chris, and Kellen, thanks for your participation in the conference. Interesting presentation and I like the discussion as well. Good luck in the rest of your meetings today.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks.