Phinia at 49th Annual Automotive Symposium: Strategic Growth Focus

On Tuesday, 04 November 2025, Phinia Inc (NYSE:PHIN) presented at the 49th Annual Automotive Symposium, sharing strategic insights post-spin-off from BorgWarner. The company highlighted its focus on growth in the aftermarket and commercial vehicle sectors while addressing challenges such as high tax rates. Phinia outlined its plans to leverage existing technologies for new opportunities, including aerospace.

Key Takeaways

• Phinia is prioritizing growth in the aftermarket and commercial vehicle sectors.
• The company aims to reduce its tax rate to the mid- to high 20s% by 2028.
• Phinia’s first investor day as an independent company is scheduled for February in New York City.
• The company is exploring new opportunities with a minimum hurdle rate of 15% for discounted cash flow analysis.
• Phinia’s strategic focus includes leveraging its technologies for aerospace applications.

Company Overview and Strategy

• Phinia, based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, supplies the automotive OE market, auto commercial trucks, and the aftermarket.
• The company has 39 million shares, with a $2 billion equity capitalization and about $600 million in net debt.
• Following its spin-off from BorgWarner, Phinia is focused on aftermarket, commercial vehicles, and off-highway segments.
• Over one-third of Phinia’s business is aftermarket, and nearly 40% of sales are in commercial vehicle sectors.
• The company is leveraging its existing technologies for new markets, including aerospace.

Aftermarket Initiatives

• Phinia is expanding the Delphi brand and increasing e-commerce to strengthen its independent aftermarket position.
• Initiatives like "Masters in Motion" in Europe and "Garage 360" in North America are aimed at training and educating installers.
• The company maintains high quality standards and a 90%-95% first-time fill rate in the aftermarket.

Financial Performance and Capital Allocation

• Phinia emphasizes financial discipline, generating profits and cash flow above minimal hurdle rates.
• The company has returned over $500 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
• Phinia’s tax rate, initially over 40%, is guided to 33%-36% for the current year, with a target of mid- to high 20s% by 2028.
• The company completed its first acquisition in August, generating approximately $50 million in revenue.

Future Outlook and Growth Opportunities

• Regulatory shifts and the longevity of combustion engines present market share opportunities for Phinia.
• Margin growth is expected from a mix shift towards commercial vehicle, off-highway, and industrial markets.
• A restructuring of $25 million-$35 million is underway to streamline IT systems.
• Phinia is considering leveraging up to two times for significant acquisitions.
• The aerospace market offers a larger total addressable market than light passenger and commercial vehicles.

Conclusion

For a detailed understanding of Phinia’s strategic direction, refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - 49th Annual Automotive Symposium:

Unidentified speaker: That and, in my view, a real opportunity for a great company with some real growth within the aftermarket. So PHINIA is an Auburn Hills, Michigan-based supplier for both the automotive OE market, auto commercial truck as well, and the aftermarket. The company has roughly 39 million shares, about a $2 billion equity cap. Balance sheet is in good shape with about $600 million of net debt, $2.7 billion total enterprise value. We have the company’s President and CEO, Brady Ericson, here, and we’ll jump right into Q&A, but as a spin from BorgWarner, this is a really intriguing company to me. So Brady, thank you very much for being here, and Chris as well.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I brought a team with me just in case over here. It’s a few folks from PHINIA. They’re some of our board members as well as some of our executives here, so just to kind of emphasize the importance of what we see in the opportunity in the aftermarket, and it’s a key area for us to continue to grow and expand as part of our portfolio, so really excited to be here.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Maybe just for those who are less knowledgeable about PHINIA, just a couple-minute overview of the company and its journey, post-spin.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, this is an asset that’s been kind of bounced around for a long time. It was originally tucked in under GM that then got spun out with Delphi. Then it was kind of the combination of. Delphi Automotive. It was kind of Aptiv and Delphi Technologies. Delphi Technologies got spun out. BorgWarner bought it. And BorgWarner bought it primarily for the electrification side. And so they really wanted the battery electric. And they kind of said, "Hey. There’s some combustion assets we didn’t necessarily want." And so then we got spun out with it. And the thing that I think is really unique about our spin-out is that we look nothing like our former parent. If you take a look at the distribution of our customers, you take a look at the markets that we serve, very, very different. And so we’ve got.

Over a third of our business is pure aftermarket, whether that’s OES or independent aftermarket. We’ve got close to 40% of our sales as commercial vehicle, light commercial, medium duty, heavy duty on highway, marine, ag, and we’ve announced some of our first aerospace launches that actually just launched here in October. And then that leaves less than 30% OE on the light passenger vehicle side. So I think we. Look a lot different, and the conferences that we go to are a lot different, and where we’re trying to grow our company is a lot different. And so our focus is really on the commercial vehicle, off-highway, gensets, aerospace type side on the OE side, and then significantly growing our aftermarket. We like light passenger vehicle.

It has some great technology, a lot of synergies that we can apply from the light passenger vehicle to the aftermarket and to the commercial vehicle and aerospace side. But obviously, it’s not an area of focus for us to grow on the light passenger vehicle side. We’ll keep the plants full. We’re continuing to gain market share. We’re continuing to develop next-generation technology for those customers, whether it’s 500 bar or ethanol or methanol, other types of alternative fuels. But we see a lot of long-term growth opportunity and cash generation and commercial vehicle off-highway and aftermarket.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe talk about how you are able to take your technologies that were developed for the light vehicle market in the fuel systems on the OE side and be able to apply that to commercial vehicles so that you’re really ahead of your competition there.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a precision-machined and assembled fuel management system, and so the real variation is what fuel you’re putting through and what pressures. Our gasoline direct injection was at 350. Now we’re at 500 bar. Our commercial vehicle may be at 1500-2000-2500 bar, and so depending on the pressure, we’ll adjust our designs. And then depending on the fuel type, we’ll adjust, whether that’s gasoline, diesel, ethanol, methanol, hydrogen. These all can be done by our existing engineers, in many cases, the same equipment.

And the one example I’ll give is we actually converted one of our 350-bar gasoline direct injection lines for passenger car, and we actually converted that line and that design to diesel at 350 bar for the off-highway market because as Tier 4, Tier 5 emissions are coming, they need to take their fuel injection system to more of a common rail system. And this is a very cost-effective way for them to meet the emission standards without going to $1,000 medium-duty, heavy-duty system. And so this is a way that we can then reallocate our human capital and reallocate our manufacturing capital from one market to the next. The other example is actually there was one of our older light vehicle diesel lines that we had in France.

We’ve actually converted that over to do aerospace, and so it’s actually now that we’ve got a pre- and post-injection system for a turbine engine for Safran. And we’ve actually repurposed one of those lines, and again, from an assembly standpoint, final test and everything else, it’s very similar. We had to add a little bit. I think it was maybe $1 million in some quality labs in order to get us there. But that was about it, and so we’ve done, and we think that’s a much better strategy to leverage our existing capital of our human capital and technology and our manufacturing capital to go after these new opportunities.

Unidentified speaker: Talk about how you evaluate those new opportunities. Clearly, in an area like aerospace and defense, the barriers to entry are typically very, very high, and yet here you are on the other side of that. Whether it’s commercial vehicle, whether it’s off-highway, whether it’s aerospace or other adjacencies. Talk about that evaluation and where you’re really trying to grow.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, we’re always looking at it through economic value and value generation. We use our 15% as our minimum hurdle rate for our DCS and our analysis. And so we’ll look at all these opportunities to ensure that it’s going to meet our minimum hurdle rates. Obviously, with aerospace, it may have really high margins, but the volumes are really low. And so we’re always going to take a look at it from an ROI or EVA basis is how we’ll evaluate it. Aftermarket has some good margins, but we have to carry a lot more inventory. On the light vehicle, passenger car, high volume, capital intensive, but man, you’re churning it very quickly, and we can get some really good returns. And so it’s always going to be focused on maximizing returns.

Unidentified speaker: I think an interesting area that you’ve talked about are alternative fuel systems, but also hybrids, so maybe talk about opportunities there for those.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I mean, from a fuel injection standpoint, it doesn’t matter when it goes out of our building. We’re not sure if it’s going to end up on a pure combustion, a hybrid, or a plug-in hybrid in general. The technology does not change. We have announced a number of programs that we know it’s only for a hybrid or only for a plug-in hybrid. So we’ll announce those. But in other cases, if it’s an engine that has all three versions, we’re not sure if that injector is going to go in one or the other depending on what the OEM does with it. And so we see hybrids are a great technology. And the plug-in hybrids, because we see that’s a way for us as a society to lower our CO2 emissions 30%, 40%, 50%.

Really quickly without having to add new mines, without having reliance on China and rare earth minerals. And it’s a great opportunity. I think the market’s finally kind of catching up to that concept.

Unidentified speaker: As an OE fuel system supplier and an aftermarket parts supplier, the two disciplines are very different. So talk about how, as an organization, you balance those. How you’re able to manage the two businesses that are very different.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think a lot of companies that are big OE and they have a small aftermarket, they continue to apply the same metrics as far as inventory turns and volumes and how they manufacture things. I think that’s the big challenge or big issue that they have. They’re trying to use the same metrics. We really have different expectations of our aftermarket from inventory turns and the such compared to OE just because they’re different businesses. With that said, it still goes back to our ROI and our EVA analysis. As long as the EVA is positive, we’re good with it, and they continue to grow it. We really look at things that way. Both businesses we’re evaluating on are they creating economic value on a year-over-year basis, and are they generating good cash flow? That keeps it very simple.

We’re fortunate in the fact that our aftermarket group, it’s not a small portion. It’s 40% of our company. It’s just a business kind of off to the side type of thing. It’s one of our core businesses. As seen by the number of people in the room, it’s one that we’re really focused on and want to continue to grow.

Unidentified speaker: And I think we’ll get to the stock and its valuation eventually, but I think it’s one of the areas where the market really is misunderstanding the value creation opportunities that you have ahead. Let’s stay just for the time being on the OE side, though, in the fuel systems business. Clearly, there’s some regulatory shifts, whether it’s Euro 7, China 6, potential standards in North America. How is that an opportunity for you?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, especially on the light vehicle side, a lot of the regulations and the edicts to go 100% battery electric are now falling away. And so that tail is going to be so much longer. And so from our standpoint, our strategy on light passenger vehicle was always around continuing to gain market share. We continued to invest. Many of our peers stopped investing in combustion technology because they thought it was going away. And that’s why we’re the first ones in the marketplace with the 500 bar technology. So I think we’re going to continue to gain market share, and we’ll probably continue to grow that light passenger vehicle for a little bit. But I think we’re going to continue to invest probably more heavily in through acquisitions in the commercial vehicle and the aftermarket segment.

So, I think as we’re talking about the aftermarket as well, I think we were talking with some of the industry experts earlier today. As far as the car park is concerned for North America, it may be 5% electric, pure electric by 2035. So this aftermarket and this combustion engine is going to be around for a long, long time. And we think we’re a business that likes generating cash flow. And having cash come in every single quarter and not having losses on another product line is beneficial for us.

Unidentified speaker: So let’s talk about that aftermarket because I think you know this conference for 49 years. It had its origins as a full automotive aftermarket conference and has since grown. Talk about PHINIA’s initiative to strengthen its position in the independent aftermarket, expanding the Delphi brand, increasing e-commerce, diagnostics or other software-enabled services, etc.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, I think if you guys have a chance, go over and take a look. I think we’ve got, I think, a number of different presentations going direct to the installers. So we have a lot of in Europe, we use a Masters in Motion over here. We’re launching it as Garage 360 and training and education, not just to service our parts, but to service a lot of different vehicles and a lot of different parts. And so we’re really trying to establish ourselves as the go-to place for the installers and the mechanics that they can go find solutions. And so we’re continuing to invest in that side of it. We also continue to invest in the basics. Obviously, having the OE pedigree, our quality standards are very high.

And our aftermarket team, who’s purely focused on the aftermarket, knows that we’ve got to keep 90%-95% first-time fill rates. And we think we’re one of the few out there that they don’t need to worry about us. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re going to continue to invest. We have a strong balance sheet. And if they want to source somebody or work with somebody that’s going to be with them for decades to come and give them great inventory support, great technology support, we’re going to be their partner. And they don’t need to worry about us just focusing on one quarter. They know that we’re investing for decades to come.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. And I would imagine as what you’re providing for the aftermarket is largely failure products. You’re able, and it clearly shows in your margins, to maintain some pricing discipline and actually be able to push back potentially on some of your customers when they want to flex their own pricing muscles.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Absolutely. Again, our team’s done a really good job to maintain financial discipline. At the end of the day, our job is to generate profits and cash flow in excess of our minimal hurdle rates, and everyone’s focused on that. We’re not just focused on growing just for growing’s sake. We’re focused on growing economic value on a year-over-year basis and generating strong cash flow, and then using that strong cash flow in an efficient way that generates more value for the customers, so we’re very disciplined in that respect. I think because as we go to valuation, because we think we’re significantly undervalued based on the cash flow that we’re generating, we’ve already returned, I think it’s now in excess of $500 million to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases because we think we’re still undervalued and we’ll continue to make those decisions.

Unidentified speaker: Well, this is an aftermarket-born conference, and we have had to talk about some of the bad that’s gone on with the aftermarket, most notably the First Brands’ bankruptcy and supply chain financing being at the top of mind for a lot of our participants, both here and on the Zoom. So maybe talk about how PHINIA participates in these programs. And then we could take the discussion from there.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, our overall factoring is relatively moderate. I think we’re in the $100-$150 million of factoring in total. The big box folks are not a huge portion of our business in North America. And again, we’re going to continue to be financially disciplined in that respect. And if we do take longer terms, that factors into our ROI contribution or our calculation. So at the end of the day, if we’ve got 365-day terms, I got to charge 15% more because that’s a hurdle rate. And so we’ll manage that accordingly. In order to ensure that we’re still able to meet our financial commitments to our shareholders and through dividends. And again, that’s also the benefit of our business. It’s primarily a North America phenomenon. And again, we have as much aftermarket business and different customers all over the world than just North America.

And so when we talk to a lot of investors and customers, we really truly feel that we’re more like a diversified industrial because we don’t have any one market or one segment that makes up maybe more than 10%. So North America, light passenger vehicle OE, less than 10%. Go to Europe, commercial vehicle, less than 10%. And so in all these different markets and all these different regions, there’s not kind of one customer, one program, one application that’s really going to move the needle that says, "Hey, if we even lost that customer 100%, we’ve got other customers that are more than happy to fill in.

Unidentified speaker: The Delphi brand is obviously one that carries a lot of weight. Talk about how you’re able to grow in the commercial vehicle and off-highway aftermarket as you’re introducing these new technologies.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I think Delphi definitely has a much stronger on the light passenger vehicle, maybe a little bit on the medium duty, more in Europe on the heavy duty side of things. But with that said, we’ve also got the Delco Remy brand that’s got a really strong market share and a brand image in the class seven, class eight set of things. And so. PHINIA is the parent company, but we manage some very strong brands. And as folks know, I mean, Delphi probably at some point in history made about every component in the vehicle, maybe like tires and everything else. And so we’re going to be selective on what we put the Delphi brand on. But the opportunities for us to grow and add product lines to our portfolio and put the Delphi brand on it. That’s why and get the pull from the installers.

I think that just is a huge opportunity for us. But we’re going to be selective to make sure that we’re not just slapping it on anything. We’re going to go through the right process to make sure it meets our quality specifications and performance specs.

Unidentified speaker: You are our only OE supplier today. So I’m going to ask just a couple of questions on how you are traversing these Section 232 tariffs and just the visibility that you have from a supply chain perspective, from a rules perspective, maybe now versus a few months ago.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, we’ve been in a pretty fortunate position in the fact that our overall strategy has always been to design, develop, source, produce, and sell within the region. We’ve probably got, that’s generally on average between the three major regions, about over 80% of it. That’s also kind of helping out quite a bit. Being USMCA compliant on the bulk of our components is also helpful. We’re going to continue to kind of drive that side of it with the tariffs. As they change so far, we’ve been successful on working with our customers on first, how do we offset it? One example was that rather than shipping from in a maquiladora, shipping it back to the U.S. and back into their engine plant in Mexico, then back into the U.S.

and paying duties along the way, we were able to kind of reroute that and just ship to them directly in Mexico. That avoided a lot of different tariffs. First is helping them try to avoid it, getting whatever product we have left USMCA compliant. Then whatever’s left, we’ve negotiated with them to pass nearly all of it on to them. It’s helped revenue, but it really hasn’t helped EBITDA. I think we’re probably, I think this last quarter, we actually collected $1 million more than we paid out because we were maybe $5 million or $6 million behind from Q2 and Q3. It shows that we’ve got 95% plus on a direct recovery basis. Plus, there’s obviously some other negotiations that we may get some other concessions in other areas that just won’t hit the tariff line item.

Unidentified speaker: If we’re thinking about PHINIA three to five years out, I think you’ve articulated this well that basically a lot of the margin growth is just going to come from mix as you enter or as you grow more within commercial vehicle off-highway and some industrial markets. But let me talk about some other margin initiatives that we may not be thinking about. That’s beyond just simply the growth of your footprint.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, you could probably see it in some of the numbers on our supply chain has been doing really well. Productivity is showing well. And again, we’re a pretty decentralized organization. And therefore, as a part of the global team, or the global team, our job is to help them optimize and share best practices. But our locally driven teams are really out there driving the year-over-year efficiencies. We did announce a small restructuring, I think around $25 million-$35 million that we’re doing for IT systems. Because again, when we got spun off, we got a lot of different systems and processes and structure, corporate structure that didn’t make sense for our size of a company. And that’s why our tax rate was super high. So we’ve been restructuring, getting rid of a lot of the intercompany loans, eliminating entities and regions that didn’t make sense.

And that’s now driving it down. We’re now doing the same thing on the IT and the system standpoint in order to get rid of a lot of redundant data centers that don’t make sense, moving it more into the cloud and coming down onto one SAP instance that also brings the efficiency of now with everybody on the same system and the same setup, my expert in Romania can talk to my new employee in Mexico on how to set things up and to deal with different issues. Where right now we can’t because they’re all set up slightly different, different chart of accounts, different systems. And so we can’t have a lot of that cross-training between regions.

Unidentified speaker: You mentioned tax rate. I think it’s probably good to talk about that before we start actually getting to the valuation and your thoughts there. But maybe talk about where the tax rate is and where you can take it over the course of the next couple of years.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, I think when we got spun, it was a shock to us and I think to a lot of our investors too, the tax rate was north of 40%. And so it was primarily because we were continuing to generate losses in countries where we had huge amounts of NOLs. So there was really no benefit from it. And we continued to make profits and high cost. And so net net, it showed a very high rate. Last year, we took it down a couple of points. I think this year. It was just over 40%. We just updated our guidance to 33%-36%. And I think year to date, we’re probably in the low end of that range. So the team’s confident that we’ll continue to bring that down.

I think what we’ve been communicating is our view is that within by 2028, we’ll probably be in the mid- to high 20s%, which is, I think, more of a normal tax rate. And again, we’re doing all these things with just standard stuff. We’re not going to Bermuda. We’re not trying to do a reverse engineered something that could change. We’re just trying to do it in the right way and just move forward.

Unidentified speaker: Yep. So I’ll set the framework for the next question. Your stock is trading at around 10.5 times earnings, 5.5 times EBITDA. You have less than 2 turns or less than 1.5 turns of debt on the balance sheet. As you think about capital allocation and how best to think about M&A versus buybacks, etc., how should we be thinking about the PHINIA strategy?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah. I mean, for us, when we make a decision, we’ll sit down every quarter with the board and review kind of where we are on potential M&A targets. We’ll take a look at where the cash is, where our cash balance, where the cash generation is going, and then make a decision on what we want to do with it. And again, when we take a look at an acquisition. An acquisition is always going to come with some risk and some unknowns. And so your expected return on that acquisition has to be a good chunk better than just buying back your own shares. And that’s why we bought back so many shares so far. And so we’re always going to compare the two.

We just announced and closed our first acquisition here at the end of August, and it was roughly at just under five times a multiple. We thought it was synergistic to our existing portfolio of systems. It was commercial vehicle, alternative fuel focused, and it was pretty small in size. It was only about $50 million in revenue. And so we thought that was the right way for us to kind of learn the acquisition, the integration process. Get our systems as a new company to kind of establish ourselves in acquisition and integration and due diligence and building relationships with key partners that help us in that process before we then start looking at more. But we’re always going to take a look at it.

If I’ve got a dollar, would I buy myself, of which I have a lot of confidence in the business plan, or would I buy this other company that looks interesting but comes with a lot more risk? And so we’re always going to make that decision on where we think we can generate the most value.

Unidentified speaker: Just thoughts on leverage relative to what your tolerance is. I asked that with the stock at 10 and a half times. Would you go to two times to buy back stock?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: To buy back stock. Not sure. We’ll have that conversation. I like the one and a half times. It gives us a lot of flexibility. We’ve mentioned to folks. Would we lever up to maybe two times for a really good acquisition? Yeah, we probably would if we see a path to get back to one and a half times relatively quickly. And it needs to be accretive. I think I like the plan right now that we have is that we’re just a consistent buyer of our stock. I think it’s always challenged when people lever up just to buy back stock. And then something happens and they don’t have additional cash flow generation from an acquisition, that’s generally going to be cash flowing more. We’re buying back stock. It’s not necessarily going to generate more cash if something does happen.

So we’re also going to look at the liquidity side of things as well.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I think just personally, my own editorial is that. You have done a fantastic job and the market has not yet figured that out. So if you have a megaphone to investors, what do you want them to see about PHINIA stock?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think the biggest thing is we’re on this campaign around showing people that even in difficult markets, we still perform really well, which is why we consider ourselves more of a diversified industrial. I think the other side of it is we’ve been communicating. We’re going to have, we’ll probably get the notes out there. We’re going to have our first investor day as an independent company February of next year. And we think that’ll give us a little more time to really educate folks on our overall portfolio, how it’s changing. We’ll have our second aerospace launched. We’re going to start breaking out our off-highway, industrial and aerospace business as another segment. And we think that will give people some additional clarity. And then obviously we can tell the story the way that we believe it. Because last time we did it, it was before spin and controlled.

And so we can kind of give our opinion. We’ve always been strong believers in the combustion engine being around for a long time throughout probably this century. But it’s going to evolve over time, whether it’s through hybrids, plug-in hybrids to carbon neutral fuels to carbon-free fuels. And it’ll continue down that path. And the aerospace and some of these other segments are completely untapped for us. And the total addressable market in those markets is actually more than our current total addressable market in the light passenger vehicle and commercial vehicle segments. So there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity. And for us to transition our components and our technology to those segments is actually quite easy. The tolerances that we see on the aerospace side that they’re asking us for. It’s just more paperwork. That’s the biggest challenge we have on the aerospace side.

It’s not the manufacturing capability. It’s not the materials. It’s not how hard the materials are or the drilling. That part is actually easier for us. And that’s why we see a huge amount of opportunity for us to grow there.

Unidentified speaker: Terrific. Well, unfortunately, we’re bumping up on time here, but I’m excited for you, and I’m excited to, where are we going to be in February? Are we going to be outside of New York?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: We’re going to be in New York City.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: So we’re going to do it at the NYSE.

Unidentified speaker: All right. Thank you very much for being here, Brady. And thank you to the board for being here as well.

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