Earnings call transcript: Aumovio SE Q3 2025 sees stock surge amid EBIT growth

Aumovio SE’s third-quarter earnings call revealed a notable performance improvement, with the company reporting significant growth in adjusted EBIT and a strategic focus on innovation and cost efficiency. The stock surged 6.25% following the announcement, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s financial health and strategic direction.

Key Takeaways

• Adjusted EBIT increased by 150% year-over-year, reaching 409 million euros.
• The company reported a strong net cash position of 1.1 billion euros.
• Aumovio SE announced a 5 billion euro order intake for radar and satellite cameras.
• The stock price rose by 6.25% post-announcement.

Company Performance

Aumovio SE’s performance in the third quarter of 2025 highlighted a strategic pivot towards autonomous mobility and user experience technologies. Despite a 4.2% decrease in adjusted sales to 14.1 billion euros, the company achieved a substantial increase in adjusted EBIT, showcasing its ability to enhance profitability through operational efficiencies and strategic investments.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: 14.1 billion euros, down 4.2% year-over-year
• Adjusted EBIT: 409 million euros, up 150% year-over-year
• Net cash position: 1.1 billion euros
• Total liquidity: Nearly 4 billion euros

Outlook & Guidance

Aumovio SE revised its sales guidance to a range of 18 to 19 billion euros, with an expected adjusted EBIT margin at the upper end of the 2.5% to 4% range. The company aims to achieve positive adjusted free cash flow by the end of the year and targets a single-digit R&D to sales ratio by 2027.

Executive Commentary

CEO Philipp von Hirschheydt emphasized the company’s commitment to operational excellence and innovation, stating, "We are committed to rigorous expense management while continuing to focus on operational excellence and innovation." CFO Dr. Jutta Dönges highlighted the company’s strong cash position, noting, "We are happy to have the opposite problem compared to our competitors."

Risks and Challenges

• Workforce reduction: A planned reduction of 20,000 employees could impact morale and productivity.
• Sales decline in Europe: A 7.9% decline in European sales may affect overall revenue growth.
• Market dynamics: Fluctuations in global vehicle production and regional market conditions could pose challenges.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about potential divestments and cost optimization strategies. The management discussed the possible divestment of the user experience business and emphasized ongoing efficiency improvements to sustain profitability.

This comprehensive overview of Aumovio SE’s Q3 2025 earnings call reflects the company’s strategic initiatives and financial resilience, underscoring its potential for future growth.

Full transcript - Aumovio Se (AMV0) Q3 2025:

Conference Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Aumovio SE Q3 2025 Investor and Analyst Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions shortly. If you would like to ask a question, please press 9 followed by the star key on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press 3 followed by the star key. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Lutz Ackermann, Head of Investor Relations.

Lutz Ackermann, Head of Investor Relations, Aumovio SE: Yeah, thank you very much, and a very warm welcome to everyone joining us today for our Q3 results presentation and Aumovio’s very first quarterly earnings call. Before we begin, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Lutz Ackermann, and I am the Head of Investor Relations of Aumovio. I joined Aumovio in October, and I’m truly excited to be part of the team, especially at such a pivotal moment following the company’s successful stock exchange debut. With more than 10 years of experience in investor relations across various industries, I’m confident that Aumovio is exceptionally well positioned for the future. I see significant untapped potential to create long-term value for our shareholders, and I look forward to engaging in a constructive dialogue with you about the opportunities ahead.

We are very pleased to have our CEO, Philipp von Hirschheydt, with us today, as well as our new CFO, Dr. Jutta Dönges. Jutta, we are thrilled to have you on board. Welcome. Jutta will take a moment to introduce herself. Both the interim report and the presentation of today’s call are available for download on our Investor Relations website. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session for sales side analysts. With that, I’d like to hand over to Jutta. Jutta, please go ahead.

Dr. Jutta Dönges, Chief Financial Officer, Aumovio SE: Thank you, Lutz. Also from my side, a very warm welcome, and thanks to all of you for joining today. I am very happy to be here today and to have joined Aumovio just a few days ago as the Chief Financial Officer. It is a great honor to be part of this exciting journey as Aumovio begins its path as an independent listed technology company. Let me quickly introduce myself. Over the past years, I have held various leadership positions in both the public and the private sector, most recently as the CFO of Uniper SE, a listed German energy company. During my tenure at Uniper, we have successfully executed a financial turnaround and repositioned the company in the banking and capital markets, as well as with rating agencies.

Prior to that, I have served on the Executive Board of the German Finance Agency, and I chaired the Executive Board of the Federal Financial Market Stabilization Agency. In these roles, I was responsible for finance, risk, and governance functions, and had a particular focus on stabilization measures during the pandemic and the reprivatization of government shareholdings, mainly via the capital markets. Earlier in my career, I spent more than 15 years in investment banking, most of the time at Goldman Sachs and Frankfurt, advising clients across industries on M&A, financing, and capital market transactions. Finally, I hold a joint master’s degree in mechanical engineering and economics from the Technical University in Darmstadt and a doctorate in economics from the Goethe University here in Frankfurt.

I have also had the privilege of serving in several non-executive roles, for example, in the Supervisory Board of Commerzbank, and I’m currently a member of the Supervisory Board of TUI. With that background, I look very much forward to contributing to Aumovio’s strategic growth and financial resilience. I am excited to work with my colleagues to implement our value-enhancing strategy, to lead the finance organization, and to shape the future of mobility. Today, Philipp will be guiding us through the presentation, as I only joined at the beginning of this week. I’m very much looking forward to getting to know all of you and entering into a constructive dialogue. With that, over to you, Philipp.

Lutz Ackermann, Head of Investor Relations, Aumovio SE: Yeah, Jutta, thank you so much. Also from my side, a very good afternoon and good morning. Before I start, let me also welcome our new CFO, Jutta, who started at the beginning of this week, and we had already several board meetings, and we are more than happy and pleased to have Jutta as a significant enhancement into our executive board. Also, as Lutz said, he joined 1st of October. It is his birthday, by the way, today. What can he have better than as a present to have the first investor call with all of you? We are very much looking forward to the additions these two are going to bring to the Aumovio SE team. Yeah, and it is a great pleasure to be here today and to discuss with you our nine-month results.

As we said, we said the third quarter is going to be a challenging one, but I think we have exactly achieved what we promised. We became even a bit better than what we thought. By that, we are progressing towards our targets for 2025, and we made, again, significant steps forward in our transformation strategy. As you can see, not only for us, but for the automotive world, we are all working and operating in a difficult and uncertain environment. We are very mindful that the economic impact of supply chain complexities, regulatory uncertainty, and muted demand continues to weigh on most players in the automotive industry. However, despite these challenges, our first standalone results clearly demonstrate our strength, our resilience, and, as I said, the progress which we have made in our transformation.

If we’re looking at the performance in the first nine months, you see that the positive trends we have already been mentioning in the first half of the year are continuing into the third one. Adjusted sales came in at EUR 14.1 billion, down by 4.2%. They are basically because of three trends a bit softer than what we have seen last year. First, the foreign exchange has its dent in its results. We have and are working, as we always said, on our project and product portfolio, where we have been giving back already in the beginning of the year a bit to print business to the customer, and we extended that to a second project, a bigger one, which we stopped in the third quarter of this year.

Thirdly, yes, we also are part of a softening European market, as you all know, the biggest region in terms of sales in our business portfolio. We have significantly increased our adjusted EBIT over the last nine months compared to 2024, and with EUR 409 million and 2.9%, we have, through our successful execution of self-help measures, as well as the project mix and product mix I was mentioning, managed to get our EBIT up, adjusted EBIT by close to 150%. Adjusted free cash flow before spinoff and restructuring cost was positive, totaling EUR 190 million, as you can see here. After accounting for these one-time expenses, spinoff and restructuring cost, free cash flow amounted to negative EUR 150 million.

Just as a quick reminder on how we define adjusted free cash flow, we calculate it as the sum of our operating and investing cash flow with specific adjustments made for interest-related cash movements and for any acquisitions or disposals of businesses. Now, regarding this period, there was only one notable cash inflow, which came from the dissolution of the cash pool with Continental. It is important to highlight that this is a one-off event for this year and not something we expect to repeat. As we already were mentioning via our several communications, investor calls, and alignments which we have had over the course of this year, our goal is and remains to achieve a positive adjusted free cash flow by year-end. In addition to that, we decided to narrow our previous sales guidance of EUR 18 billion-EUR 20 billion to EUR 18 billion-EUR 19 billion.

A slight reduction, but we now expect that our adjusted EBIT margin is going to trend toward the upper end of our guidance range of 2.5-4%. Our strong improvement in these nine months and also in the third quarter was primarily driven by enhanced profitability, as I said, the active portfolio management, and very disciplined cost management. I’m going to come to that. As you all know, on September 18, we debuted at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and are listed in Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the form of a Societas Europea. We are expecting and gearing up towards then the MDEX inclusion by December 2025.

Yeah, I need to say once again, as we have managed that in a very short period of time, a big thank you to all our employees and to our advisors, as well as to our former sisters and brothers at Continental, who managed to get this project done in a very short time span. For us, this means this is only the beginning. As an independent company, we now have the opportunity and we have the responsibility to prove ourselves by delivering the best product for our clients and creating lasting value for our shareholders. To achieve this, we remain firmly committed to what we cannot say often enough, to sustainable value creation and the consistent execution of our three-pillar strategy, which is in leading products. We are transforming our organization into a high-performance organization, and what we commit, we are going to deliver in the future.

I think it’s something which we have been showing in the third quarter of this year. Returning now to the adjusted EBIT growth and the sales results of the nine months, you can see, as I already was mentioning, a 4.2% reduction compared to last year’s result, basically half of it due to negative FX effects, and then the other half reflecting our portfolio measures, as well as the overall automotive environment and macroeconomic uncertainty. What were the main reasons of why we have significantly increased our adjusted EBIT? It has been, on the one hand side, and we will come to that in more detail, an increase in our gross margin and a very distinct, you know, we are working on that for quite some time now, very distinct fixed cost measurement.

We have managed to deploy our expenses even more efficiently, and we have continued our fixed cost program, which we call Accelerate, which targets these sales and general administration expenses, as well as the fixed cost in plant management. That is how we managed to sequentially improve our margin, and it shows that we are capable of executing what we commit and that we have a very tight control on costs and are in the process of step-by-step improving our operational efficiency. Yeah, if we look at the next page showing the transition from the reported to the adjusted EBIT, you can see that we have had, in the first nine months, a quite significant array of special items. By far, the major part, restructuring and termination, we are a company in transformation, something which we do very diligently.

We have had a lot of our dissolution from Continental and the spinoff of our Aumovio company, EUR 154 million spinoff costs. For example, the divestiture of our Italian drum brake plant, we have EUR 63 million booked for adjusting our plant footprint, as well as to optimize our portfolio. The EUR 34 million, we also do have some parts in others. I think what you can see here is the clear commitment of the management team to work on our fixed cost base to improve our overall efficiency and to make Aumovio a performant company. If we go more into details to compare 2024 to 2026, you can see that we have been managing to increase in that nine-month period, comparable nine-month period, our gross margin by close to 2.5 percentage points.

This is, on the one hand side, due to the fixed cost management in our plants, as well as a significant improvement on scrap and rework. Additionally, we have, and that’s, you know, our clear target is to be at R&D net to sales at a single % in 2027. We are still working on deploying our R&D resources in a much more efficient way, which leads then to a reduction of net R&D, means net of customer reimbursements of EUR 136 million. The EUR 82 million SG&A costs are all together then an improvement, which we are able to significantly overcome the others. A lot of different topics like operational FX topics, lower reimbursements for tooling, or less income from invested companies to reach then 2.9% in 2025 year-to-date. Now, let’s look at the development across our business areas on slide number eight.

You can see that our diversified and complementary business mix continues to support revenue performance despite a challenging market environment. Operational discipline remains a key focus for us. While overall sales across business areas remained subdued in the first nine months of the year, we can see that autonomous mobility had a slight sales decline, mainly due to exchange rates and specifically in North America. Here, you can see the significant improvement after nine months from negative EUR 87 million to negative EUR 10 million, very short of becoming break-even or only short of becoming break-even of EUR 10 million. That is mainly due to significant fixed cost savings and here in research and development. The architecture and network solutions organization has in sales been short of last year, mainly due to the fact that we have terminated the bid-to-print business. I reported out in the last quarter results already about that.

We have seen volume reduction in that business, and the cost savings have not yet been able to compensate for the sales decline. Very positively have developed our Safety and Motion business area, you know, the biggest one with sales only slightly lower than last year. The EBIT increased significantly, close to EUR 100 million. Also here, due to a very tight fixed cost control and measurements now rolling into the operational results, as well as a significant improvement on quality cost, led to an EBIT margin of 4.5%. The biggest turnaround we can see on the User Experience side, I mean, we already reported in the first half that we are on the brink of being break-even, another quarter of being break-even.

Great result by the user experience team, sales on prior level, although we have had it back in the third quarter, one business to customer. You see that the strong improvement in EBIT, we already explained at the capital market date, it’s about operations excellence. It’s about getting the plants and the projects being ramped up. You see our management works, and we are making big steps forward towards the mid-digit return on sales level, which we want to reach in user experience in the long run. Yeah, contract manufacturing, one of the last times we are going to report that, I mean, next year we are going to run out. I think sales with EUR 100 million, not very decisive and slightly negative because of the contracts which we have concluded already some time ago. Now, let’s look into the future.

Let’s look into order intake, where we continue to see substantial order intake across various customers and regions in the first nine months of the year with EUR 14.7 billion. What we have seen in the third quarter is a slight reduction in order intake compared to the first half. However, the important part is that what you can see here now, we do diversify. Our clear target is to grow in Asia, in China, and specifically also North America. Where we are a bit shy of what our targets have been is in Europe, which accounted only for 41% of our order intake. We have seen a significant uptick on the, for example, Chinese OEMs, where we have in China, meanwhile, representing 22% of our total order intake, significantly above our sales share today.

We also see that we are in a very competitive market capable of getting more and more business from Chinese OEMs, which are meanwhile even higher order intake than the international ones. That is running quite nicely. We also expect that in the fourth quarter, we are going to see a decent order intake. However, we also see that the insecurity and uncertainty in Europe lead to the fact that many customers are postponing their orders into next year already, which creates then some shortfalls, as you can see here already in the European order intake. We are proud, as you can see, we have EUR 5 billion order intake with radars and satellite cameras for autonomous mobility. I think it shows the future of that business area. We have won, again, a big Telematic Control Unit order from a German OEM.

As you can see here, the MK C2, not only a very favorable integrated brake system for European customers, but also more in China, we collect orders. As said, and user experience this year has also managed to get this period has managed to get a significant increase in orders, specifically in Asia and specifically with Chinese OEMs. If we look into comparison of our sales towards the market, you know, for us, we are focusing on value creation. We are focusing on bottom-line improvement. Top line is only of second measure. I mean, we know that growth helps, but growth only helps once you turn it into profitability, once you are capable of achieving your capital cost, once you are doing better in return on capital employed for the entire company. That is something which we always stress.

All that includes three Aumovio phase, persistently challenging regional performance regarding vehicle production across all our major markets. These headwinds were also driven by, as I said, our active portfolio management, which contributed to a lower sales baseline compared to the prior year. If we are looking at the results, the global vehicle production increased by an estimated 4.4%, whereas our sales declined by 3.7%, adjusted for foreign exchange effects. Specifically, we were shy in Europe, where our sales declined by 7.9%. That was primarily driven by the termination of the projects I was mentioning, the one in architecture network solutions, as well as the one in user experience. In North America, we grew by 3.5%, trailing a bit behind the 4.7% production uptick. I guess for North America, you can see that remains a very solid contributor to our overall growth.

In China, we did grow, but I mean, the market is very dynamic, and we were not able to cope up with the overall market development. However, we do see that we are getting more and more grip. We transfer more and more responsibility into the Chinese market. We are capable of managing time to market of our customers. They are reflecting in the order intake of our Chinese OEMs. I think all the right steps have been taken in order to make us successful in the future. If we now turn to our transformation agenda on page 11, you can see that over the last 21 months, actually, we have managed to significantly reduce our workforce and trying to adjust to the necessary needs in the markets and to become a much more effective and efficient company. 20,000 employees reduction.

Specifically, also our fixed cost measures have been running as predicted. We are also going to say we are now able also to increase the total savings, the forecast of our project scope of all the fixed costs, which we are targeting since Q3 2023. We always said we are going to save EUR 200 million in 2024. We saved EUR 200 million in addition in 2025. We assume we are going to make this year now not EUR 200 million, but EUR 300 million. On the R&D efficiency side, we are, as I said already, in net absolute amounts, EUR 233 million better than last year, which now leads to an R&D net to sales ratio at 11.9%. This is compared to 12.3% in 2024, an improvement, but also shows we still need to do something.

We do see also good chances to be even more effective in the future and to see how we are going to be able to reach our target of single digit in 2027. Next steps still need to be taken. One major step of making us more efficient is our footprint. We have made consistent progress in executing our ramp-down strategy. You can see here our R&D locations and production locations we have already closed or are going to be closed over the course of the next months. We always said we are going to focus on mega factories, and we need to be in the market for the market. That is specifically important and necessary, and also looking at recent developments for sourcing, purchasing, or procurement for development as well as for production. In 2024, we had 56 plants.

If you were following us on the capital market, you might remember that our ambition is to come to less than 45 plants. If you add up here all what has been already done and what is going to be done, you see that we are going to get to 49 plants going forward. What you also see is something which we mentioned in the capital market 2023, that we need to look at the amount of the number of R&D locations which we have. You can see that we have also managed to create a significant reduction of complexity also there.

In parallel, we have announced that we are going to invest $110 million in New Braunfels, Texas, supporting our address component production for the local market, which also shows that on the one hand side, we are capable of managing and decomplex our organization as well as growing where it’s necessary and building up mega factories going forward. One other key highlight is how we have managed to close, as we promised and committed to reduce, to sell our drum brake plant in Cairo Montenotte, everything according to plan. This plant is going to go out then or has been gone out in the last quarter. With all that, let me now turn to our adjusted free cash flow calculation on page 30. The free cash flow remains and remains and will always remain one of our most important financial metrics.

We have started, if you look here on that slide on the left-hand side, we start from adjusted EBIT, and by adding back depreciation amortization, we arrive at an adjusted EBITDA of around EUR 1.1 billion. This is after nine months, I would guess, of strong level, especially considering we are currently in a transition phase. However, bridging from EBITDA to free cash flow involves several deductions. Firstly, we are investing into our company, but with a clear focus on high return areas. Something which I explained already several times, we do have a well-invested infrastructure. Our investments in the first nine months represent 3.1% of sales only. That, again, demonstrated our disciplined approach. Networking capital, employee benefits, and interest payments are relatively smaller buckets, but also still relevant. Despite not being income positive at the group level, we incurred tax payments totaling EUR 261 million.

This was primarily driven by non-creditable withholding taxes, such as those on intergroup dividends and the fact that no cross-border profit and loss offsetting is possible. Going forward, we will evaluate measures to improve efficiency of our cash tax outflows. That’s something which we now, being a standalone company, something which we will, which we are able to focus much more. Others include various positions, such, for example, prepaid expenses. The largest, if you look at it, the largest item in our nine-month adjusted free cash flow is a combination of cash effective restructuring charges for the right sizing of our company, as well as spin-off costs, which together amounted to around EUR 340 million. These all were necessary steps to right-size the company and prepare for future growth.

If we adjust for these one-offs, our underlying adjusted free cash flow, as I already explained in the beginning, before restructuring and spin-off costs stand at a positive EUR 190 million. This is a solid result and a clear signal of the company’s underlying cash generating strength. Let’s look quickly on the components of CapEx as well as on working capital. As I said in all our meetings during Capital Market Day as well, we are an invested company. It means that we have done our major invest in new best cost country plants as well as in the necessary technological changes. We discussed about user experience just recently, where we have had to invest in mega plants, where we have needed to invest into the technological and product turnaround, something which we now see in the nine-month result. We make big progress.

You can see here then that the elevated levels from 2020-2022 to 2020-2024 or 2023 are now over, and we will return to normalized CapEx levels post-completion of these mega factories. We are committed to a disciplined CapEx management. You can see that in the results of 3.5% or EUR 490 million after nine months. I think that is something we manage quite well. The operational excellence programs run all as planned. You see that on scrap level. You see that on gross margin programs. You see that here on the CapEx level. That is something we are quite satisfied with. Where we still need to make some improvements is on the working capital side. Our composition, if you compare that to 2023, is getting better. There are still some chances of becoming better in terms of overall structure and efficiency.

You can imagine that geopolitical crises, which we are currently experiencing, are not helping to significantly improve inventory levels going forward. Before we are on, then let’s say turning into the last pages, I think you can see with the next page that we are remaining with a very strong liquidity position, which provides us stability and financial flexibility. We have one of the most and strongest, or let’s say strongest balance sheet in the industry with a total liquidity of nearly EUR 4 billion, comprised of EUR 1.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents and EUR 2.5 billion credit facility. Even after accounting for gross financial debt of EUR 335 million, which includes all leasing liabilities, we maintain a net cash position of EUR 1.1 billion, giving us significant financial flexibility.

Additionally, the net pension liabilities have been reduced from around EUR 1.7 billion to EUR 1.3 billion over the last nine months, primarily due to an increase in the German discount rate from 3.5 percentage points to 4.1 percentage points. We deem our balance sheet as very healthy, and it helps us and positions us perfectly for future growth as well as for resilience. Very shortly, we expect the fiscal year 2025 to unfold in a generally stable yet challenging market environment, particularly in Europe, where light vehicle production volumes are projected to decline. I mean, we discussed that we have a major stint in the European market and that we are working on diversifying that. North America is expected to see a contraction with production down 2% year over year. Maybe that’s going to be even a bit better.

By contrast, China is the one that’s always showing the overall growth in the market. With 6.6%, we do see strong growth, and that all leads to 2 percentage points on a worldwide basis. If we then come to the end, or before we go into Q&A, we have said we have narrowed our guidance for 2025. Despite the subdued sales in some regions, our total sales will remain within our guidance, but now narrowed to EUR 18 billion-EUR 19 billion. The operational discipline and the transformation efforts are driving our performance, and adjusted our EBIT margin is expected to close at the upper end of the previously communicated range of 2.5%-4%. As I said already, we strive to achieve a positive adjusted free cash flow by year-end.

This outlook reflects foreseeable impacts from trade conflicts, exchange rate shifts, and material and logistic costs, while excluding potential disruptions from new regulations or macroeconomic shocks such as semiconductor supply issues. We remain firmly on track to achieve our full year 2025 targets. Our year-to-date performance provides a strong foundation with revenue and expense goals well supported. Despite a challenging macroeconomic environment, our diversified business model continues to demonstrate resilience, keeping us aligned with our growth ambitions. Maintaining cost discipline is the key priority of our Aumovio. We are committed to rigorous expense management while continuing to focus on operational excellence and innovation. Our cost efficiency and transformation initiatives are delivering tangible results, and we expect these benefits to continue throughout the year. What you also see is that our order intake is specifically in regions outside of Europe growing.

Our innovations are also showing its improvement, and order intake is at a level where outside of Europe it should have been. Looking ahead, we remain so much clearly focused on enhancing profitability, progressing toward our midterm objectives, and delivering long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I come to the end. Lutz? Okay. Thank you, Philipp. Thank you, Jutta. Now we come to the Q&A session. Operator, please take over for the moderation of the Q&A session. Yes, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 9 and star on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to withdraw your question, please press 3 and star. Please press 9 and star now to register for questions. We are coming to the first questioner. It is Christoph Laskawi from Deutsche Bank. Good afternoon. Good afternoon.

Thank you for taking my questions. The first one would be on the quarterly performance of some of the divisions. If we start with UX, the margin obviously deteriorated Q3 over Q2. I assume the Q2 margin, which was quite positive, is also linked to the one-time pricing effect that you had during the quarter. Should we expect a sizable improvement into Q4, or what’s really the reason of going from 5.4% to a negative margin again? Then linked to that, looking ahead, do you think you need the UX business in your portfolio, or could you think about carving it out again as it was previously planned? In contrast to that, obviously with the strong decline in top line, A&S actually performed quite well, sequentially increasing margin to 5.8% over 5% in Q2.

Is this basically cost measure related, or was the business that you gave back loss-making and really margin accretive knowledge just to hand it back? The second point would be on cash. Thanks for providing a lot of detail already for this year. Thinking about 2026, is it fair to assume that restructuring should be an outflow of around EUR 150 million, and there’s only a slight portion still to come in terms of spin-off cost? And then last question I would have is on Nexperia. Following headlines on Bloomberg today, it seems that you have first export approvals from China. Could you just comment on that? What’s the situation currently? Where’s the inventory? Are you at risk to stop production somewhere? Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the question. Very good. Let’s see whether we covered everything what you were asking. Let me start with user experience.

You’re absolutely right. The second quarter was exactly elevated because of a one-time investment, or let’s say a one-time customer reimbursement, which we expect. Our clear target is to remain break-even for the entire year. You see that the loss or you have seen that the negative adjusted EBIT margin has significantly reduced. If you compare that to the sales which we have seen before, you can imagine we made really considerable steps forward. That is why we are convinced we are going to make also a, let’s say, a black zero on the user experience side going forward. All our portfolio measures we have been doing over the course of the last months and last quarters, we always say we look at the business. First of all, we bring it towards the top three position in their respective market. We see how do we get it performing?

Does it fit into our strategic focus? If we say no, we need to review whether we are going to be the best partner. That is something we have now the time after the spin-off to look at, and that is something which we are going to do over the course of the next months and strategic cycles. We will get back to you once we have reviewed all that. I mean, with your last question, you mentioned already something which did not help to now do the great strategic discussions. We are, since the beginning of October, working in a big task force team to manage down the Nexperia impacts towards our company.

As you have seen rightly, we have received also yesterday, after a verbal communication during the course of this week, we have also received written approval to be exempted from the export control of Nexperia, Nexperia China export ships out of China. We are again delivering into the rest of our plants worldwide. We assume that at least short term, we are not going to have any interruption of our processes and production. Let’s jump back to the A&S. You are absolutely right, I mean, where do we focus on if we hand back businesses? If we stop businesses, that’s definitely projects which are not supporting our value creation. The business we have been handing back was not in a way contributing to what we expected to do so. Also, the team is heavily working on adjusting the cost space.

It is twofold in everything we do. Let’s say gross margin improvements via portfolio measures and then also fixed cost measures in order to improve the total bottom line. What is missing? Cash 2026. Cash burden. The cash burden for 2026 out of the restructuring which we have had in 2020. For restructuring, we expect cash out until year-end, still of somewhat EUR 100 million-EUR 120 million. For the next year, it is going to be seen then the next year. Understood. Thank you. Good. The next question comes from Horst Schneider from Bank of America. Over to you. Yes, thank you. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one that I have relates to the outlook for the fourth quarter, alone by the R&D reimbursements, of course, Q4 is going to be strong.

I just want to check if my assumption is right on R&D reimbursement. I think it was last year something like EUR 120 million Q3 over Q4. Is that going to be the same again, roughly in this ballpark range also this year? What are the building blocks for Q4? I think you mentioned, Philipp, that clients are postponing a little bit. I’m hearing that maybe the revenues could be down quarter on quarter. What else is happening quarter on quarter? The R&D reimbursements go up. How are the other things developing? Price, costs, this stuff that influences the margin. That would be great if you could comment on that. I think we never discussed for Aumovio really the dividend. I know your dividend payout ratio.

If I strip out the special items basically from net income, you have got a positive net income. When I look at your cash, also you could pay a dividend. How should we think about this dividend topic for 2025? In general, what do you intend to do with your net cash? Because it is unusual for a supplier that a supplier has got so much net cash. I know some of your peers have got the problem. They have got too much debt. You have the comfort. You have got too much cash. Nevertheless, what do you want to do long-term with this cash? You want to be a company that accumulates cash, or at some point, you either want to buy back shares or maybe also consider maybe M&A.

The last one that I have relates to CapEx and R&D because CapEx was very low in the third quarter. You highlighted that. Is this trend now something like 3-3.5% CapEx, something we should also consider going forward, or you think that CapEx should go up not just in Q4, also in 2026? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much for your questions. Let me try to answer them step by step. Fourth quarter, you’re absolutely right. Always in our Aumovio, we have had significant increase of R&D reimbursements in the fourth quarter. That is always the best quarter in this regard. We have also, and that leads then to the fact that our net R&D is going to get better always also in the fourth quarter. Our cost measures are still running.

We expect now, I mean, we expect we know that our Italian plant is going to go out. We know you have seen that on a very constant base. We also worked on the amount of headcounts which we have in our organization. We are still cautious in terms of sales and do not see a significant increase to the third quarter. That is why we also needed to see that we have narrowed our sales forecast. Philipp, what is the impact from this plant in Italy that you were mentioning? How many employees come off the payroll? Some 350. 350 people come off. Okay. All right. Great. With regards to dividend and net cash, I mean, first of all, we are happy to have the opposite problem towards in comparison to our competitors. I agree.

As you see, I mean, our industry is facing significant transformation. Everything we did while spinning off and the cash position was exactly in the light of that because we were foreseeing that is going to be difficult times. What we always said is we first need to get through the woods with our organization and reorganization and restructuring. Then we are looking into how and where, how do we ensure that shareholders are also participating not only by the intended increase of share price, but also by other capital allocation measures. R&D and CapEx. R&D, there is a very clear target. We are convinced that while being a competitive company in what we do, you need to be able to manage your business with a single-digit R&D to sales, net R&D to sales.

That’s a very clear commitment, and you will see that we are going to work on that going forward, and that’s what’s in our plans for 2027 and will also not change. Capital expenditure, as we always said, we are convinced that we are going to be below 5% going forward, also in the long run. That we deem not to be that we think we are going to achieve without the greatest challenges. Is there more possible to be even more efficient? That significantly depends on the order index and our growth trajectory. What we always can commit is that even if we are going to grow faster than what we currently foresee, we should be able to leverage our existing and invested plants in West Coast countries. Life is the upper end.

Whether we are going to be able to keep three and a half for long, I doubt, but somewhere in between, we are going to land. The assumption would be right that R&D comes off just in 2027 significantly when this Aurora business basically gets ramped up and the development work is done. CapEx should also go up in 2026 just because you need to ramp up this Aurora business. You have not really replied to my dividend question. Dividend for 2025 is not on the agenda. You can rule that out, or you look into that just at year-end? Yeah. I mean, two things. I mean, if you look at all what we do, a dividend in 2025 is very unlikely to be distributed. With regards to R&D, we are also making steps forward in 2026. I mean, it’s not only Aurora.

I mean, we are working in many different areas to be more efficient. You are right. In 2027, we should see an even bigger step. The capital expenditure for Aurora is not going to be affecting our overall targets with regards to 5%. I mean, that’s all in. That’s all planned. It is already under execution. Okay. Okay. Great. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you, Horst. The next up is José Sumendi from JPMorgan. Over to you. Thanks very much. A couple of questions, please. I wanted to come back to maybe the implied fourth quarter margins. Can you maybe discuss whether you see margin improvement across all the divisions, or are there any negative one-offs across the four divisions that would maybe not allow that sequential margin improvement when we think about the fourth quarter versus the third quarter?

Thinking about 2026, obviously, too early to give guidance for 2026. As we stand right now, do you see room for further margin improvement across the company with the visibility you have in the business model and already the cost-cutting plans you mentioned for 2026? I mean, year-to-date, today, I do not see any specific one-offs for any business area which might appear. I do not see also any counter effects. I mean, we stand to our margin commitment to come to the upper end of our range. We also see, as I said, we have received the exemption from export control from China. At least on our side, we do not see any significant impact on that part, on that side. I am not aware of any specific impact going forward. Do we see room for margin improvement? Yes, of course.

That’s where we work often day-to-day. I mean, we always said we want to reach 4-6% in the midterm. The faster we come to the upper end of that margin range, the better it is. Yeah. No. I mean, many of the measures we do today, we do during the course of this year, and that needs to roll over then also into the next year. You can imagine that we are already working on additional measures for 2026 because we are convinced specifically in Europe, the market is not going to significantly improve. Contrarily, we assume it’s going to be stable, if at all. Thank you. You’re welcome. At the moment, there are no further questions. If you have any additional questions, please press 9 and the star key on your telephone keypad. Thank you very much. There are no further questions. Okay.

Thank you so much, operator. If there are no further questions, we have come to the end of today’s conference call. I’d like to say thank you for the participation. If there are questions left, don’t hesitate to contact the investor relations department. Our next earnings presentation will cover our full year results, and that is scheduled for March next year. We look forward to sharing more updates with you then. With that, I would like to conclude today’s call. Thank you very much, and you may now disconnect.

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