Okay, let's go ahead and kick it off here. I'm Luke Junk. I cover vehicle tech and mobility for Baird. It's our pleasure to host Gentherm with us this morning. Gentherm is the auto market leader for thermal comfort and, more recently, lumbar massage as well. Both attractive growth opportunities. Joining us, we have, to my right, Phil Eyler, President and CEO, and to my left, Greg Blanchette from Investor Relations. The email address for questions is session7@rwbaird.com. And with that, why don't we start with some background on the company, Phil? I know you've got a few slides prepared to kick us off.
Yeah, thank you, Luke. It's a pleasure to be here, and we're excited to discuss Gentherm. And I want to start just with a brief overview of the company and tell you a little bit about what's going on. First of all, if you don't know Gentherm, Gentherm is the global leader in thermal and pneumatic products, primarily for automotive, but we also have a small but growing business in the medical device sector as well. I want to start with the investment thesis for the company. First of all, Gentherm is a laser-focused company. We're very much a pure-play leader in thermal management and pneumatic comfort. We stick to our knitting, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we're the global market leader with significant market share in that space.
We believe that our position as the largest independent provider of thermal and pneumatic products is a real differentiator for us. We can work with 50+ OEMs around the world and also 30+ Tier 1 seat manufacturers around the world and many others, and any combination of those. We're very flexible. We feel like that puts us in a really nice position. We stay focused on where we can win. Hopefully, that'll come out a little bit more in the discussion today. The second item is really about the automotive space for us. Obviously, the business, the vehicle side of the world goes through long cycles and ups and downs. The benefit of Gentherm's business model is that we're really driven by adoption and take rate of features that differentiate the vehicle for our customers.
If you look at our current products, thermal and lumbar and massage products, they're continuing to grow in terms of adoption. There's still a long runway of vehicles that will adopt the technology and increase take rates. We think that sets us up for significant growth above market for a long time. Third, we're really an innovation company. We're typically two-plus generations ahead of our competition. We invest heavily in R&D for a player of our size in our space. We're really proud of the new technologies that we're bringing to market. That's around, of course, the hardware, the items that you feel when you get into a car, heating, cooling, massaging, that kind of thing. Even more importantly for us is taking that hardware and wrapping it in software. Software has been a key part of our growth and certainly our future.
And then lastly, consistent execution. We've had a strategy in place for years, seven-plus years, where we've been very laser-focused in terms of how we're going to grow the business, certainly focused on growing in a profitable way, expanding our margins. And we're proud of our discipline around that that we've executed on. I just want to talk briefly about 2024. We set forth three major priorities for 2024, and we're really happy with how we're executing within those priorities, even in the midst of a pretty dynamic and challenging vehicle production market. Number one is, in terms of the priorities, was leading the industry with Automotive New Business Awards. It's been a very healthy year, 2024. We've won $1.8 billion of new awards.
We're on track for above $2 billion in awards for the full-year, and we're winning those at a very high rate, about 80% win rate for the year, really, I think, expressing our competitive differentiation in the market. And we're excited that an awful lot of those awards are our new product line, which is massage and lumbar products, associated with an acquisition we did about two years ago. And secondly is really executing on our Fit-for-Growth program. And obviously, with semiconductor shortages, inflation, supply chain challenges, plus acquiring a company with lower margins, it's imperative that we drive continued expansion of margins. And we've done that. So we've expanded year to date our EBITDA margins by 100 basis points. And we feel like we're still pretty early on that journey of margin expansion that we can deliver regardless of what's happening in the vehicle production landscape.
A lot of that's driven by value engineering, purchasing excellence, but also manufacturing footprint improvements. And really heavily focused on how do we expand gross margins for the long term. And I mentioned innovation is a big differentiator for our company. This has been the best year that I've seen in the history of the company in terms of bringing new innovations to market. It's not an easy thing to do in the automotive space, but we've consistently done that. Our first ClimateSense platform launched with the Cadillac Escalade IQ. It's on the road now, so finally we have ClimateSense out there. We won a ComfortScale Award, which is our integrated hardware. It has heating, cooling, massage, lumbar.
We believe it's the first of its kind in the market, and that's going to launch on the General Motors truck platform in a couple of years and many more potential wins in the pipeline there, and then finally, I think a huge differentiator for us is pulsating massage, Puls. A. We've announced awards with our first award with Hyundai on the Puls. A, and we're excited to give you a new announcement here for this conference. We actually won our second award with our Puls. A technology with Jaguar Land Rover on a next-generation Range Rover product line, so this technology is really resonating with automotive customers around the world, and basically what the pulsating massage is, it builds off our industry-leading technology in terms of massage, but also applies a pulsation when the massage bladders are expanded, and it feels very lifelike. It feels really like human massage.
It gives you that kind of sensation. We believe it's the most exciting in the market right now, and our customers are telling us with two major awards and a lot more interest behind that. So really excited about the momentum on the innovation side and a lot of the opportunities ahead for the company. So Luke, I'll leave it at that.
Okay, well, thank you for that, Phil. Maybe before we jump into the just normal Q&A type things, you announced last week you'll be stepping down as CEO on January 1st. If you could just talk about why now is the right time and what assurances folks should have that this is going to be a smooth transition to Bill Presley.
Sure. Thank you, Luke. Yeah, we announced last week that at the end of this year, I will be stepping down as CEO of the company, and the board and I have worked on a transition plan for over a year now, really allowing me to focus on different professional interests and opportunities that I've had in mind for the future, but doing so in a way that's very planful and sets up the company for continued long-term success. That's why it's kind of taken this long to do it. We're really excited that we've identified a fantastic successor in Bill Presley, who is currently the Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman for Aptiv. We can certainly pick up questions about him, and then importantly, I will also be working with him for a period of six months, very focused on a really smooth transition for the company going forward.
Obviously, it's a challenging market that we're in right now, but I will say Gentherm has not executed at this level in the time I've been with the company. Very high level, winning awards, launching new technologies, expanding margins, and with still room to go ahead for that, and absolutely well-positioned on the innovation front. So I believe it's a perfect time to give a stable, high-executing company to the next leadership regime.
Okay. I want to start just a couple of questions on the environment, and then we'll get into how you're going to outgrow that environment. Certainly some downward pressure on vehicle production as we've gone through 2024. Just in terms of what you're seeing in schedules in the fourth quarter, how does that make you feel about visibility and any room for cautious optimism as we go into next year in production at a high level?
Obviously, we'll give our outlook on next year at our Q4 earnings call in February, but I would say it's still pretty dynamic and challenging in the space right now, pretty much in line with what we talked about at our last earnings call a few weeks back, and the good news is for us, we continue to see new programs launch on our product line, new wins that we believe are going to set us up for outgrowth regardless of what the market does next year. Bigger picture on the market, I still remain cautiously optimistic that we've got some upside opportunity down the road. Obviously, the consumer is pretty constrained based on interest rates, and I think because of a lot of factors, there's been challenges when it comes to the consumer.
Hopefully, with a couple of factors playing, the age of vehicles is near one of the all-time highs, call it 12, 13, 14 years, depending on what analysis you read. I think there's going to be an upswing. It's just a matter of when it happens. In the meantime, the company is absolutely well-positioned to weather any challenge for whatever period it takes.
And second thing would just be, of course, we just had an election. There's going to be a change in administration. And just what's number one on your agenda, the company's agenda post-election? I would assume tariffs are likely top of mind, and you've got some footprint in Mexico as well. Maybe you speak to what can be done at this stage, really.
I think nothing really new from that perspective for us. Our first priority is execute, execute, execute. We have a good strategy, and we're well-positioned. Our job is just to continue to execute going forward, both on the new product side. We've got a ton of new launches coming in the next few years, but then on our Fit-for-Growth program. When it comes to potential tariffs, obviously, one area to consider is China, which is a growing market for us. We continue to grow with domestic OEMs in China. We're very much local for local. It's the way we operate, whether it's in Europe, North America, or China. We feel like we're really set up to be resilient with whatever may come when it comes to tariffs, for China would have pretty small impact for us.
We've worked really hard to dual qualify suppliers to set up our supply base in these locations. When it comes to Mexico, a couple of dynamics happening there. Of course, it's been more of a challenge in terms of attracting and retaining labor for a lot of companies and certainly rising costs in the market. That's one challenge in Mexico. We believe we have a differentiated business model there in terms of the product, the type of work environment that we have. We've been pretty careful on the locations to allow us to attract people. So we're doing well. We're really excited about our new plant in Monterrey that we're just now ramping up that's going to have huge benefits for us, and that plant, we ended up shutting down a plant in South Carolina, moving it to the Monterrey site.
And at the same time, Monterrey is where we build all of our pneumatic lumbar massage for the North America market, which has been really growing fast. Grew, I think, 46% last quarter in that product line. So it's a very important plant for us. With respect to tariffs, we're just going to have to wait and see. Clearly, a huge number of suppliers in the automotive sector manufacture their products out of Mexico and supply not just OEMs that operate in Mexico, but also through the Maquiladora program into plants in the United States. So we'll be watching that closely. I think that's going to have, if there is any change there, it'll have an industry-wide effect that'll ripple through the supply chain, and we'll have to manage through that.
Yeah. With respect to Mexico, do you think there's strength in numbers in the sense that, yeah, everyone in the industry is going to be facing this similar to maybe a couple of years ago with chips and inflation where cost actions were needed, but there was strength in numbers from a supplier standpoint? How is maybe tariffs coming out of Mexico similar or different to that dynamic, would you say?
I would say your terminology is right. As I said, the vast majority of certainly high-volume manufacturing for the space is done out of Mexico now. And so if there is a change that precipitates a footprint adjustment, that'll have to be something that's digested by the industry. We're very confident. We're very proud of the team we have in Mexico executing at a very high level. But we have a very flexible manufacturing footprint that is dynamic. And basically, if you walk into one of our plants, you've seen all of our plants. So that's something that we can always adjust to.
Okay, well, let's talk about what is within your control, and certainly launch cadence is one of those things as we go into next year, and maybe if you can just help us understand how that launch cadence disconnects you from the macro backdrop going into 2025, especially lumbar massage and CCS as key products within that?
Yeah, I think we're really excited about the growth of our product lines and the increased adoption. We're seeing lots of new vehicles adopt our thermal and our pneumatic technologies, and we see that continuing. Just looking at the awards, I hear a lot of comments that the award backdrop for some companies is a challenge in 2024. For us, we're on pace to be well over $2 billion in awards, and we're not seeing a big slowdown in the opportunity, so I think that's a good sign for us that even if vehicle production is challenging or maybe new vehicle launches are getting delayed a little bit, our product is still getting pulled into new platforms, and so we're really excited about that, but to your point, the challenge for us is a lot of launches ahead. We have to execute those flawlessly.
We have to make sure that our product performs at the highest levels for our customers. Certainly, we're extremely excited about our pneumatic lumbar massage product. If you look at the growth that we've had this year, it's been significantly above market, 46% in the last quarter, well over 20% in Q2, and that's really based on some early wins that we had post the acquisition. There's still a long string of new awards that are going to launch over the next couple of years with that business, so the pneumatic lumbar massage business will be our fastest-growing product for years. We've got General Motors, Stellantis, Hyundai, which we just talked about, the Range Rover product line. We've got Jaguar product line. It's a big, long list of pneumatic awards that are going to be launching, and that's going to keep fueling this new product line growth.
But we still expect significant growth above market in our thermal business over time as well.
Yeah. Maybe, yes, thermal CCS versus seat heat, should we expect more of that growth on the CCS side going forward?
I think it'll be higher. Yeah, the CCS side will be a little bit higher because the CCS, if you look at the product, the CCS includes both heating and cooling. And we're seeing more vehicles shift away from heat only into heating and cooling. One of the largest global EV manufacturers around the world, we've also seen, we're really excited about the business we're doing with them, is shifting to heat and cool on their high-volume platforms. And that's something we're seeing with not just a lot of people ask me, is your focus on the luxury players? And of course, that's very important to us when you get into the BMWs and other platforms. They're very high content. But we're seeing just as much, if not more growth on mass-market vehicles that are starting to apply this technology. And Hyundai is a great example.
Mazda is a great example for us. Just launched on the Toyota Tacoma and the Toyota Camry. So we're really excited about the momentum.
Yeah. Maybe if you could talk about that momentum more broadly on more mass-market type vehicles and getting that penetration up and what the industry is looking at right now in terms of affordability, what that might mean for vehicle mix or trim mix and how those things intersect. Do you think there's enough momentum to overwhelm even if trim mix is a little bit of a headwind next year, Phil?
Yeah. Well, anytime we see the high-content vehicles reduce production, it has an effect on us because it's a high-leverage platform. Those tend to come and go over time. But I think where we're a little bit different is that our technology is, as I said, starting to penetrate these mass-market vehicles. And you're going to see that continue to climb, not just on the thermal products, but also on the pneumatic products. So there's a lot of dynamics we think that position us very well to kind of manage through any shift in a vehicle platform over time.
Maybe if we can talk about the cost side. So you highlighted in the presentation Fit-for-Growth 2.0. That's been a key margin driver. I think we're still earlier innings in that initiative. Can we just talk about key enablers as we go into next year, especially the new facility that you mentioned in Monterrey? There's some work going on in Morocco as well and just the incremental cost tailwind and flexibility of those facilities, if you can just help us better understand.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at Fit-for-Growth, our focus over the last couple of years in this, I'll call it second round of Fit-for-Growth, but it's becoming much more just institutionalized in our company. I don't think there will ever be an end to Fit-for-Growth at Gentherm. But basically, we've been heavily focused on gross margin. If you go back to 2018 when we started Fit-for-Growth, it was a little bit more focused on restructuring the business, getting out of certain product lines, and then also getting our OpEx right-sized. And we feel really good about where OpEx is right now. It's a real opportunity for leverage once we do see vehicle production come. But we've been heavily focused on the product cost, taking cost out of the product, whether that's redesigning the product with less components, less material through value engineering, certainly setting up.
We're really excited about the work our purchasing group has done to build strong partnerships with suppliers around the world, and that's giving us really nice cost-down opportunities that are not just the benefit for us, but also in our growth for our partners. Suppliers want to be with a customer who's growing, and that gives us a really nice position, and then finally, of course, labor and manufacturing is a big part of what we do and repositioning our manufacturing footprint so that it's ready to grow, but also do so in a cost-effective way. We've been actively working on a couple of projects, and we'll keep working on these over time. I talked a lot about Monterrey. Monterrey is going to be a super important location for us for years.
And then, if you look at the last quarter and probably Q4, it's a little bit of a headwind just because anytime you're starting up and ramping up a new plant, it takes some time to get there and some unique one-time costs. That will start to phase out. In fact, even in Q4, we expect to see a net benefit from Monterrey in terms of net cost savings. And then late this year, we'll also be starting production at our new plant in Tangier, Morocco. Really excited about that plant. We're going to be launching multiple product lines there for the European market primarily. That'll go through a similar process, a couple of quarters of one-time costs, and then we'll start to flow through pretty sizable savings. But for both plants, really importantly, they've been designed to scale up.
So we can scale up production as new awards start to roll in.
Maybe just additional factors within your control on the cost side. I'm thinking maybe R&D, especially just the trade-off between protecting earnings in the near term, but continuing to invest in future growth there.
We definitely focus on R&D as a key area for us. It's one of the most important investments that we make as a company. But we do so. I think how we can do that in an effective and efficient way is we focus. We're not trying to just constantly invent things that are outside of our periphery. We very much focus on areas we know we can win, and we know they're going to have a potential return for the company. And if we invest in areas that don't seem to be going somewhere, we'll pull out and redistribute those to areas that we do see growth. A great example of that is our recent announcement to kind of move away from a lot of the battery performance solutions products that were pretty high investment, but we didn't feel had the right return long-term for the company.
So we were able to scale that way down, redistribute the resources to our pneumatic products and our thermal products that are in advanced development that'll continue to give us an edge in the area that we expect we can keep winning.
We've got about five minutes left here. I want to touch on a couple of things, bigger picture. First would be ClimateSense. So exciting that you've got the first production vehicle out there with Escalade IQ. Just to what extent do you think the evolution of EV and your ClimateSense roadmap are intertwined or independent? And certainly, the foundational software award with GM was a big deal. How much of a marker could that be for the form of future deals, would you say?
Yeah. Well, ClimateSense has two major benefits. And the first one's about optimizing comfort for the passenger. So it's designed to automatically adjust heating and cooling for each individual passenger in the car for the optimal experience for them, regardless of what powertrain is there. And that's something that's actually what the product was designed for in the first place. The extra benefit that comes with it is that it can help minimize utilization of the HVAC system so that it can extend range. And it's basically conserving power in the vehicle. So those two go together. Certainly, an EV has the double benefit. But we're really excited that more OEMs are interested in the experience benefit for consumers. And General Motors is a great example. We launched, obviously, on an EV, the Escalade IQ EV. And hopefully soon, the Celestiq will launch as well.
But we are also, I think the benefits of the platform were so appreciated by GM that they made a decision to carry the software from us. It was our first-ever software award across ICEs and EVs into the future. So I think that's a good indicator of the value proposition. And certainly, we've worked very hard to make our solution very scalable so that the benefits can continue to differentiate Gentherm with other customers around the world.
Yeah. What about the China market? Clearly, been a very dynamic environment, local share shifts and whatnot. Just if we click to two years ago to today, a very different market. And as we go into 2025, how should investors think about how Gentherm's posture has changed in response to this dynamism and kind of the key levers that you're pushing on incrementally in China as we go into next year for growth?
First of all, for years, we've been a local company. Obviously, we're an American company, but we have a local presence that covers engineering, supply chain, manufacturing. Everything is localized so we can operate at China speed. We have a great leadership team in China that has been very nimble and adaptable in this space so I think that sets us up really nicely to adapt to what's happening in the market. Of course, we didn't expect to see the significant share shift that's happened over the last couple of years away from global OEMs to domestic OEMs quite at the pace that it happened and certainly, if you just look at this quarter, it had a fairly significant effect on our revenue. We were able to overcome it and still outpace the market by 800 basis points in our core climate and comfort business.
But what our team has done that I think sets us up very nicely is we very selectively targeted domestic OEMs to take our products to. And I think that's even if you look at what's transpiring real time, a lot of the revenue that we've lost with the global OEMs has been compensated for with growth from Great Wall, with Li Auto, with BYD. We just announced a couple more wins in the last quarterly report with Xiaomi and with Leapmotor. So we're selectively picking those customers that align well with our product and our technology that'll allow us to get the right experience out there. We're certainly not chasing the lowest price out there. And we're certainly not going to deliver product that compromises our reputation in the market. So we're excited about where things are going.
I think incrementally, we're in a really good position to grow with some of those key players.
Okay. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. So I think we'll leave it there. Please join me in thanking Phil and Greg for the presentation this morning.
Thank you.