Phinia at Morgan Stanley’s Laguna Conference: Diversified Growth Strategy

On Thursday, 11 September 2025, Phinia Inc. (NYSE:PHIN) presented at Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference, outlining its strategic focus on diversification and resilience. The company highlighted its plans for expansion into new markets and its capital allocation strategy, while also addressing challenges in the commercial vehicle sector.

Key Takeaways

• Phinia is expanding into aerospace and off-highway sectors, targeting mid-to-high single-digit revenue growth by the end of the decade.
• The company emphasizes a diversified business model to mitigate risks associated with specific industries.
• A $50 million acquisition of Swedish Electromagnet (SEM) was completed, with $90 million available for further share repurchases or acquisitions.
• Phinia aims to generate $160 million in free cash flow in the second half of the year.
• Technological advancements in GDI and multi-fuel systems are central to Phinia’s growth strategy.

Financial Results

• Revenue:

- The aftermarket business contributes 34% of global revenues, providing stability.

- Light passenger vehicle revenues are around $900 million, with a target to maintain approximately $1 billion.

• Free Cash Flow:

- First half free cash flow was $20 million, with expectations to generate $160 million in the second half.

• Capital Allocation:

- $20 million is allocated for dividends.

- $50 million was spent on the SEM acquisition.

- $90 million is available for share repurchases or other acquisitions.

• EBITDA:

- EBITDA margin midpoint decreased slightly to 13.9% due to tariffs, with a guided midpoint of $470 million.

Operational Updates

• New Markets:

- Phinia is launching aerospace programs with Saffron, starting in Q4 and Q1 of next year.

- The company aims for new markets to contribute mid-to-high single-digit revenue growth by the decade’s end.

• Fuel Injector Business:

- Conquest opportunities have normalized to a 20% to 30% win rate.

- GDI market share in North America ended 2024 just below 20%.

• Technology & AI:

- Over 400 software and calibration engineers are working on AI projects to improve production efficiencies and inventory management.

- IT infrastructure is being consolidated into one SAP S/4HANA instance globally.

• Onshoring Strategy:

- Phinia aims to source and sell over 80% within the region, reducing reliance on Asian suppliers.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy:

- Phinia is exploring organic growth in commercial vehicles and other markets, with potential acquisitions if valuations align.

• Hydrogen Combustion:

- Significant revenue from hydrogen combustion is expected in the 2030s, with development focused in India and China.

• Emissions Regulations:

- The company is preparing for 2027 emissions regulations and anticipates further upgrades for 2030 and beyond.

• Market Volatility:

- Phinia expects stability in North America’s commercial vehicle sector, without further declines.

Q&A Highlights

• Onshoring and Automation:

- The strategy involves regional sourcing and utilizing AI for operational improvements.

• Aerospace Market Entry:

- Phinia’s entry was driven by manufacturer demand and strategic evaluation of its technology.

• Multi-Fuel Technologies:

- The focus is on adapting to future fuel uncertainties, including capabilities for 100% ethanol or gasoline.

Phinia’s detailed strategies and financial plans are available in the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference:

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Good to go. Okay.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Good.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: All right. Let’s get on with it. Brady Ericson, President and CEO of PHINIA, and Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We have Kellen in the audience as well here, Kellen Ferris, Vice President of IR. Thanks for joining us. We are delighted to have you talk about PHINIA’s outlook for growth and market development, capital allocation strategy, just the simple stuff. I can tell you, being a kind of a retiring auto analyst, there’s a lot of suppliers that would like to trade places with you in terms of your portfolio and your balance sheets. Not that it’s an easy job, of course, but the opportunities that you have to continue to improve the business and work on that multiple as well, which is quite, quite, quite good progress so far. I know you’re not satisfied yet.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yep.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Would love to trade places with you. One of the really interesting things that we’ve been talking about with Brady and Chris that may not seem so obvious is why is it covered by auto analysts? Auto, as an end market, is 27% of your total revenues and I suspect falling over time, not rising over time. You’re not burdened with the R&D and operational and execution burdens of the electric vehicle portfolio. Aftermarket is thriving, and we’ll get into that as well, as to how much duration there is behind that. Really happy to get into some of these topics with you. Brady and/or Chris, any opening comments or messages beyond what I stated that you wanted to get to the audience?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I think you hit a lot of the key comments. I think we’ve been trying to educate folks on the diversity of our business, not just from the different markets, but also regional diversity and customer diversity. I know we’ve been talking to a lot of folks so far, and there’s some doom and gloom out there around commercial vehicle trucks and build rates and whatnot. They ask us, and we’re like, yeah, we’re kind of okay. Yes, CV, you know, heavy-duty North America is still less than 10% of our revenues, and so it has an impact. South America’s doing okay. Europe’s kind of plugging along. We’re seeing some positive signs out of Asia. As you pointed out, aftermarket continues to chunk away. For us, we really see ourselves as a very diversified industrial.

We’re not going to get swung one way or the other based on one particular market. We’re feeling kind of very comfortable where we are right now from the balance sheet standpoint, from a cash flow generation, and just continuing to use that free cash flow as efficiently as possible to benefit our shareholders.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Great. William, why don’t you delve into some of the more finer topics?

William, Analyst: I think there’s a number of new markets that you guys have entered or announced that you would enter over the past year. Obviously, you had hydrogen before, which seems like it’s, you know, maybe a focus, may not be. Aerospace is the most recent one. Talk about the decision to enter the aerospace market, maybe a little bit on the off-highway too, but the new markets broadly, what the focus is and where you see that going.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I think what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to leverage our existing human capital and manufacturing capital and taking it into new markets. This is not a situation that we have to invest another $100 million in R&D or put in new plants or anything else. The lines that were producing light vehicle diesel in Europe are the lines that we converted to make aerospace. The engineers that worked on light vehicle diesel and commercial vehicle are the ones that I can shift to aerospace or off-highway. The ones that we had on hydrogen for a while, we still think hydrogen is going to come along, but it’s going to take a lot longer. We can reallocate those to ethanol and methanol applications and alternative fuels.

That’s, I think, the one nice thing about our strategy is depending on where it goes, we can easily shift our human capital and manufacturing capital. Going into aerospace, there’s four major customers out there, so I don’t need a big sales force. We know who they are. They’re learning who we are. It’s really just engineer to engineer. We’re starting to pick up a lot of RFIs and RFQs, and we’ll launch our first two programs with Saffron, first one here in Q4, the next one in Q1. We think there’s going to be more to follow. Going into the off-highway applications, with their Tier 4 and Tier 5 emissions, we’re bringing our existing technology. We converted the GDI line to run on diesel for some of those off-highway applications. Again, we’re leveraging existing capital for new applications and similar engineers.

I’m not having to hire and fire a bunch of people, not having to take my CapEx to 7%, keep my engineering at 3%, my CapEx at 4%, and we can easily transition depending on where the markets are.

William, Analyst: there any way of, I guess, sizing those opportunities? I know you’re aiming for the 2% to 4% growth rates at the end of the decade.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yep.

William, Analyst: How reliant is that growth on these new markets? When you think about how much the business could shift to these sort of adjacent tangential markets, what % of the business does that become over time?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I still think it’s going to be in the mid to high single digits of our total revenue, you know, towards the end of this decade. It’s not large enough right now for us to call out, but we’re probably going to call that out probably sometime next year after we finish the 2025 number to give more color to our investors, as we did to separate light passenger vehicle from light commercial vehicle to give them a little more color. I think it’s going to start to become substantial enough that it makes sense for us to call out. I think the total addressable market for those off-highway and aerospace is as big as our commercial vehicle business globally. It’s a multibillion-dollar total addressable market of which we really have little penetration.

We think there’s a strong demand from customers given the new emissions regulations and requirements that it’s going to have us getting pulled into those sectors.

William, Analyst: To your point, you already have the plants, the same engineers. You’re not spending a ton of CapEx on this, so it’s basically like a free call option. It’s like, why not?

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: We also manage our R&D spend by project. We’ve actually flexed that up and down depending on what we’re seeing out there. We were spending a little bit more a year or so ago. We pulled that back as we saw that coming down on hydrogen and things. We can flex it back up because it’s the same engineers, it’s the same knowledge base that you apply to it.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Probably over 2/3 of our engineering spend is application engineering. Application engineering is taking an existing core product and just adapting it to installation to their specific requirements. It’s the same basic technology. I don’t need to develop something from scratch. It’s just tweaking it to the specific customer application. That’s the same thing that we’re doing on the aerospace side and off-highway side.

William, Analyst: We talked a lot about the organic diversification. You guys just acquired a company called Swedish Electromagnet (SEM). Any other inorganic expansion opportunities, ways you can augment your business? I’m sure there’s a lot of attractive targets in this environment.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, and again, we’re always going to look at it and compare it to our own valuation and our own multiple. When we were trading at four and five times, there’s not a whole lot of companies out there that we think are good that’s going to be at or below our multiple. That’s always how we’re going to compare it, which is why we bought back, you know, close to 20% of our shares since we’ve spun because we just thought we were way undervalued, and buying somebody else at six or seven times when we’re trading at five and they’re going to be similar, it doesn’t make good sense to us.

Now as we’re getting up to maybe, you know, we’re now just over six, that may open up a few more opportunities that we can maybe find some interesting assets that may be trading in the five to six range. If it’s a pure aftermarket asset, maybe we go a little bit higher. We’re always going to compare it to the safe and conservative plan of just buying back our shares and continuing to let it appreciate. That’s our base plan. I think of just continuing to grow organically. We’ve got good opportunities to grow organically, and if we think our share price is a good value, we’ll continue to buy it.

William, Analyst: Anything specifically on the aftermarket business? When you’re in environments like this and everything is going down, you benefit by having a very stable business line like aftermarket that’s not tied to auto production. I guess any sort of trends that you would call out? I feel like it’s one of the businesses that people tend to overlook with PHINIA.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, again, it’s 34% of our global revenues. It is, you know, if you look at a ship, that ballast, and so when the ray, all the waves are crashing, we’ve got that nice ballast that keeps us from moving around. That’s constant cash flow, constant support. When OEs are down, our aftermarket tends to come up a bit. It’s been a great business for us. We’re going to continue to expand in that area. We produce about 60% of the revenues in our aftermarket segment from product that we produce internally. 40% we’re buying and reselling. The Delphi brand has a great reputation with the mechanics and customers in the field. We’ll work with suppliers, have them meet our specifications, and then we’ll add additional product lines to our portfolio. That’s what’s been kind of helping our aftermarket, you know, grow a little bit faster than the market.

As we continue to bring, you know, additional product lines in, that’ll continue to support us. The Delphi brand is a great brand for us to use.

William, Analyst: Back on the core fuel injector business, maybe on the more automotive side, I remember when we initiated last year, one of the big trends was that all the other legacy auto suppliers were divesting away from fuel injectors. I won’t say specific names, but some of the larger ones. Is that still a trend that’s going on? Are you getting that free market share? Where has the share shifted over the past couple of years?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I think it’s probably more prevalent in 2023 and 2024, where we were probably 50% of our con, we were winning 50% of conquest opportunities. I think that’s down now closer in the 20% to 30% range.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Would it be historically normal?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Excuse me?

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Would 25 to 30 be more of a normal?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: It’s more normalized. I think, obviously there’s one that’s said they’re kind of exiting in their plan in the 2030s. There’s another that their JV partner in China is kind of tired of losing share, and they’re probably getting a little bit more aggressive on that. They see more opportunities in GDI and plug-in hybrids in China, and they’re probably being a little bit more defensive. I think what’s also happening in the marketplace, we’re not getting as many RFIs or RFQs because customers are just, rather than sending out a bid, they’re just extending the program and keeping volumes higher. They know in our space, sending out an RFQ is not going to do much when there’s only two people out there, and they know they’re not going to switch to somebody that already has over 50% market share.

We’re seeing a lot of just natural extensions beyond what we originally were expecting. Just to your point earlier, I think, you know, we still like light passenger vehicle. We’re still going to support those customers. I’m just not trying to grow it from a dollar perspective. It’s about $900 million of our revenue right now. I’d like to keep it around there, maybe go up to $1 billion, keep the plants running, generating cash as we continue to grow in the commercial vehicle and other markets.

William, Analyst: Any update on GDIs, which is a little bit more light vehicle? Staying on the same point, but it is a growth opportunity within light vehicle.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I mean, we’re seeing a lot of positive growth in China. You know, and what people didn’t know when we were spinning in 2023 and thinking EVs were going to take over the world, we had the Li Auto’s, the Chang’ans, and the BYD saying, "Hey, can you give us a GDI injector for $355 in a bar?" Because we know hybrids are going to be needed in their portfolio. EVs are great. I just don’t think it’s going to be 100%. EVs may plateau. I think they’re plateauing in China even around 30%, maybe going a little bit higher. It’s not going to 100. Maybe it goes to 40, maybe it goes to 50, but that means there’s still, you know, 50, 60 million engines, combustion engines out there.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: Our GDI also in the U.S. or in North America has also been very high. We ended 2024 just below 20% in terms of market share. It has been our biggest area of growth over the last several years.

William, Analyst: Maybe shifting a little more short term, anything you’d highlight on industry volatility across the business, maybe a little bit on the light vehicle CV side. There’s not a lot of CV peers that we look at personally. It’s always helpful to hear what you guys have to say.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I mean, North America is obviously probably the most challenged right now. I think I’ve been hearing from a number of folks that have talked to some of the commercial vehicles, there’s not a lot of hope. There’s a lot of despair out there. We’re kind of OK with it. You know, we’ve been bumping along this bottom at this run rate for now, it’s probably going on the fourth quarter. From a sequential standpoint, we don’t see it getting worse. We see it bumping along the bottom.

William, Analyst: When do you think the inflection happens?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: When freight rates start coming back up and freight demand comes back up, interest rates, I think, is one that people have been pointing to. I’m not sure interest rates alone are going to get people to buy more trucks. They just don’t have the demand. We’re hearing people are putting trucks on the lot, they’re cannibalizing some of the parts, they’re going to keep those used trucks lasting longer. I think the build rates right now are below replacement rates, and so there’s probably vehicles being decommissioned faster than bringing on new ones. That’s because the demand for freight is not there and the freight rates are too low. I think if housing starts to come back at some point, that will then start helping trucking and freight rates to come back up again. I think it’s going to be a while.

I don’t think there’s going to be a pre-buy. I don’t see it happening this year. Maybe there’s a little bit next year, but I don’t see any big pre-buy before the model year or the 2027 emissions regulations come out.

William, Analyst: I have to ask, any update on tariff mitigation plans, anything related to policy?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: No, I mean, I think as we communicated, we think overall tariffs are going to be neutral to our P&L. When we gave our new guide, we basically said that, you know, revenues are going to be up $50 million, $60 million because of tariffs, but there’s going to be zero EBITDA impact. That’s then affected our EBITDA margin midpoint going from 14.1% to 13.9% because of that, because it was revenue without profit. The midpoint of our EBITDA number stayed at $470 million. There were some puts and takes, some ups and downs, currency benefit, volume in North America down, Europe, you know, all in all, we kind of held our overall guide in Q2, and we’re still on pace to be at the high end on the revenue side.

William, Analyst: Capital allocation back half. Part of the story was that you’re going to continue to buy back stock, continue to be on free cash flow, and that was sort of like what differentiated you from the other suppliers. How do you think about capital allocation the back half of this year and then, I guess, heading into next year?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I mean, again, no change to what we’ve been doing. We’re going to continue to be a good steward of the capital for our shareholders. First half of this year, we’ve been a little bit light on our free cash flow generation. I think it was only around $20 million, but we kept the guide where it is. We still expect to deliver our midpoint at $180 million, which means we’re going to generate about $160 million of free cash flow in the second half. $20 million of that’s going to go to dividends. That’s generally what we’re giving out in dividends. We spent $50 million on the SEM acquisition, so that leaves us about $90 million left to either do share repurchases or other acquisitions. Nothing urgent on the acquisition side, I still see a good use for share repurchases.

Our debt levels are at $1.4 billion, so it’s a little bit below our target. Our cash balances are in a good position. Again, I think we’re in a very enviable position. We’ve kind of continued to maintain our conservative nature and being very financially disciplined.

William, Analyst: Any audience questions? We’ve got 15 minutes left.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: If I could just weigh in on the onshoring strategy, what is the onshoring thesis for PHINIA, and how would that differentiate from other suppliers that you might be looking at and benchmarking? I’d like to follow up just on automation. We’re hearing, as LLMs and GenAI get into the physical world, there’s opportunities for manufacturers to create digital twins and eke out efficiencies and over time mitigate some labor cost inflation in key markets that might be necessary in an onshoring world. How do you kind of see that?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I mean, again, in general, our strategy has always been design, develop, source, produce, and sell within region. Again, we’ve always generally, on average, you know, over 80% is sourced and sold within region. We don’t like to ship a bunch of stuff. When this all kind of occurred, we were in a starting point pretty good. Are we looking at, you know, additional opportunities to get that 80% to 90% or 95%? Absolutely. That may require some things kind of going back and forth, not just in one direction to the U.S. or North America. We are looking at some of those opportunities, primarily to desource some of the Asian suppliers. It tends to be where the biggest impact and where we were sourced before. We are working with those suppliers to put plants here in North America to support us.

And/or, you know, we’ll look at make versus buy changes as well, but still within our 4% CapEx. From an AI perspective, we’ve probably got, you know, a dozen different projects going on around the company. We actually have a digital steering committee that monitors all the different AI and IT projects that we have going on. They’re going to be probably a lot more targeted. We don’t have customer service type entities that we can quickly automate. As far as helping us analyze, you know, production efficiencies and key data that we’re tracking, warranty analysis, inventory, software, calibration work that we’re giving to customers. There’s a bunch of different programs that we have, but I think they’re going to be more targeted. They’re really going to be focused on, let’s ensure that whatever we’re doing actually delivers the value that we expect.

You know, doing AI just to say we’re doing AI and not driving value to the bottom line is not what we’re going to do.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Has it changed the kind of people, though, that you’ve brought into the organization? I don’t know if you can point to any recent external hires or other areas that have brought in to beef up the IT part of it.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: We have software engineers already, and we have little pockets of where we have, I mean, we have a group that’s in the UK that had done the original software engineering, but then we’ve concentrated that and moved a lot of that into India and into Turkey, where we have software engineers and doing work around that. Engineering has a big push on that. Within my group in Finance, I have a robotics department within our shared services that literally comes up with ways to automate some of our internal administration stuff and push it out to the world. There’s a group there. That’s a very small group, but when you take that, you can push it out easier. The software side, the engineer side, it’s a lot bigger.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: There’s probably two different sides of it. As Chris mentioned, we’ve got over 400 software and calibration engineers. People wouldn’t, you know, we’re mechanical. People think it’s mechanical. We probably have a lot more software engineers than maybe our predecessors do. That’s why we get close to $100 million a year from our customers for software calibration, cybersecurity, specialty projects that we actually quote them for packages that will do $3 million, $4 million, $5 million packages to do cybersecurity for them. We have a lot of capability inside that also allows us to do the complete system integration. That’s kind of one side of it. On the IT and the finance side of it, that is an area that we’re probably going to be investing in the next few years because as we got spun out, we’re legacy Delco Remi, legacy BorgWarner, legacy Aptiv, legacy Delphi Tech, acquisition.

We’ve got a number of different instances. Our goal is to then right-size the structure and infrastructure. We don’t need six data centers spread around the world for our size of business, but that’s what we got spun off with. We’re consolidating all that. We’re looking to go down to one. As we go to SAP S/4HANA, we’ll consolidate down to one instance globally, make it more consistent across the organization, which makes it easier for acquisitions, makes it easier on the finance team because now we’re not trying to go all these different systems and have to talk to different systems, and the chart of accounts becomes consistent. We’re really going to be driving for consistency across the organization, which is going to help as we do AI or any kind of software upgrades.

We can blow it through everywhere without having to do, right now, the person who runs the financial side in Turkey can’t really talk to the one in Juarez because their chart of accounts are different, their queries are different because they don’t have the same system. We think that’s going to be an opportunity for us to drive a lot of significant savings.

William, Analyst: I think the technology of fuel injectors, it’s complicated. It’s not simple. I’m sure all these AI tools, design, CAD, all that benefits you guys to design new products to some of the OEMs.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think I was in our, it used to be a lot higher and they cut down the amount of data. For every single diesel injector that we produce, there’s about five megabytes of data that we store for every single injector as far as the data that we’re storing and having to have traceability to. As we start getting that, I think the AI and the big data, that’s an opportunity for us to really start analyzing how can we make our part more efficient, more robust. Where do we see variations? How can we control better? We’re talking about tolerances that we’re controlling to plus or minus half a micron. If people realize, you know, half a micron is like a little bit larger than a virus. That’s how small that we’re controlling. Oh, by the way, in our diesel injectors, it’s 3,000 bar.

People kind of go, what’s 3,000 bar? That’s close to 45,000 PSI. Your tire, when your tire explodes, it makes a big bang. That’s like 40, 50 PSI. We’re managing 45,000 PSI of pressure inside of our injectors. With half a micron tolerances, they have to last a half a million miles with a bunch of junk and biofuels and sulfur and crap they throw in these things. This is not easy stuff. I’ve been in the industry for 30 years in turbos and engine design and development. This fuel injection stuff is next level. When we start taking that technology and capabilities to aerospace, it’s like the aerospace stuff is easy. From a man, they just have a lot more paperwork to do to kind of track everything. As far as the manufacturing processes and capabilities, it’s really not a big issue.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: It’s a high-pressure job.

William, Analyst: What’s the.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: That’s 50-year-old dad.

William, Analyst: Sorry, you’re getting me excited too about fuel injectors, and I never thought.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Brady Ericson gets very excited about this.

William, Analyst: You get very excited. What’s the next big tech wave in fuel injectors? Like, what’s the next big unlock?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think on the light vehicle side, you know, we’re already leading with the 500 bar technology out there. I think we’re looking to push that maybe a little bit higher. I think a lot of the fuel injection is being adaptable to multiple fuels, whether it’s different fuels and multi-fuel applications, because customers are not sure what the fuel of the future is going to be, but they need a fuel system that can adapt to whatever people are going to want to adapt to. We’re doing a lot of multi-fuel where it runs on, it can run on 100% ethanol or 100% gasoline. In Brazil, we’re seeing dual injectors that will do both diesel and natural gas or diesel and hydrogen. I think there’s a lot of unique technologies coming there as well.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: If I can just chime in here, are we still at, I know that there’s an extended stay of execution or more extended useful life for internal combustion technologies, particularly because of hybrids and then regulatory changes as well. Would you still categorize that we may be in the final generation of the technology? Like, OEMs aren’t really trying to make a giant leap in injector technology for light vehicle or commercial vehicle applications, or kind of where would you push back on that?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, I mean, on the commercial.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: is going to be good for you?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Commercial vehicle guys, we’re still developing next generation. They’re still trying to squeeze out that 1%, 2% efficiency. We’re launching 2027. We’ve got some other upgrades that people are working on for 2030, and they’re already asking us for upgrades for 2032. In our view, and what we’ve stated is our view is that combustion engines are going to be around for the rest of the century in transportation, full stop. Now it may go from gasoline and diesel to carbon-neutral fuels like ethanol, methanol, to carbon-neutral fuels like hydrogen. It’s going to take the transition. It’s going to take decades to transition to those carbon-free and carbon-neutral fuels. A liquefied or a gaseous fuel is just a very, very efficient, energy-dense way for transportation, off-highway construction, marine, aerospace. It’s going to be something like that. Battery technology is going to get there.

I don’t think it’s going to get there for at least clean renewable energy is not going to be available in quantity in Wyoming or South America or Southeast Asia.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: If I were to ask you on hydrogen combustion to gauge your level of excitement today versus a year ago, is it the same, less, more? Doesn’t feel like it is.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: It’s probably a little bit less because I think people are now becoming more realistic on the time frame. In commercial applications, they like to run things for three or four years before they make a wholesale change. I think we need to get more demo fleets out there.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Kind of chicken and egg.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Right.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: You need more of them in order to commit.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: We still need the infrastructure. Same thing as battery electrics went through. They still have infrastructure. Do we have enough hydrogen stations? Is the cost of hydrogen there? We’re working on hydrogen to bring down the hydrogen cost quite a bit because we actually got approved a new grade of hydrogen that’s for combustion.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Geographically, where’s the main event for hydrogen combustion? Asia, U.S., Europe, or?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think more India and China.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: OK.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think India is interesting because they’ve already got a large infrastructure for natural gas. They’re used to those, so the tanks are already in the vehicles. They understand how it works. For them to convert those stations and infrastructure from natural gas to hydrogen.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Not liquefied. It’s not like under high pressure.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Correct.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Or cryogenic.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Do you think it’s a 10-year story with hydrogen? Is it a 20-year story? Is it a 30-year story?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think it’s at least a decade.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Yeah.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I don’t think it’s going to be any meaningful part of our revenues until sometime in the 2030s. There’s still a lot of interesting work. I mean, go take a look at, we just did a hydrogen van, like a 24 hours of Le Mans driving it around France for 24 hours straight in cold weather, hauling things with really no issues with a 10-minute refill time. We’re working with Alpine and a number of the F1 folks on hydrogen for racing as well, as they see that as a way forward because they love combustion sounds of an engine. Now they’re trying to get cleaner as well. We got a lot of opportunities there as well.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: What about marine or defense?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: For hydrogen or for just in general?

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: In general.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Love it.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: You still need fuel injectors.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Oh, yeah.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Fuel injectors and tanks.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, it’s going to be different. I mean, they’re going away from, you know, the heavy diesel on the marine. Now they’re looking at, you know, ammonia. They’re looking at methanol. They’re looking at different fuel types as well. Again, we’re kind of agnostic to all the different fuel types. We can adapt to whatever they want. From our perspective, depending on where the trend is, we’ll adjust accordingly. A year, a year or two ago, we had a lot of customers and 50 development programs that they were paying for for us to develop on hydrogen. They’re now asking us for ethanol, methanol, and ammonia. We can adjust accordingly. I think the fuel injection system at the end of the day is going to be at the heart of it because that’s the main thing that has to change and we’ll find the one that’s most impacted.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: Some of these first aerospace are for defense models, and we’re having to produce them in country for the country that they’re for. We’ve done it before. I’ve done it before on BorgWarner. BorgWarner has some too. It’s very niche, it’s very small, it’s very lucrative, but it’s just a different market. Yeah.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: It also ties in the aerospace ties in well with having a good aftermarket because they have their, hey, every 1,000 hours, they’re going to replace your injectors regardless of whether there’s an issue or not. You get, you know, we’re starting with the OE side of it. After a number of years, we’ll start to get to MRO that comes with it as well. That’s going to give us that perpetual, you know, dividend.

William, Analyst: I’m just going to guess the aerospace, the defense injectors are probably multiples more expensive than what you have in a CV8 or a.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Their volumes are lower. They’re, again, a lot more paperwork. Their focus is on quality and delivery. That’s their biggest challenge. Full stop. We don’t have to talk to them and negotiate on, you know, is it $3.22 or $3.17? They want 100% guarantee on the quality, and they don’t want their lines to be affected. That’s probably the biggest impact they’ve seen over the last decade: supply chain issues that have prevented them from meeting their numbers. We see ourselves as a good supplier because our program management, you know, and on the commercial vehicle and light vehicle side, you don’t miss an SOP. If you miss an SOP, you’re out of business. When we’re supporting our first customers, not only were we on time, we were early. They didn’t know what to do with us because they’re used to everyone being late.

Us actually being ahead of time was very unique for them.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Audience questions? Two minutes?

William, Analyst: Was the decision to enter aerospace, was that more of you being approached by manufacturers that needed to diversify, or was that a you decision because you had the technology and you could make it work?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: I think it was a little bit of both. I think we were originally approached because they had some supply issues probably five, seven years ago. The relationship started building at that point. We continued to show our commitment to the space. We continued to allow our teams to be entrepreneurial, to find new opportunities for growth. They planted the seed, and that seed is turning out to turn into a nice little tree. We are going to continue to cultivate it and plant some more trees.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: It really came through some of our engineers who had contacts within the industry, and they start talking and speaking, and it just kind of grew from there. They had a need, and they knew what we did, and they approached us, and they talked to our engineers and get a solution.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Power connection.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yep.

William, Analyst: What are some of the good public comps for your business, industrial, commercial aftermarket that people should think about?

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Yeah, it’s on our deck. Probably about half of them that we use as our, I guess, compensation and peer for TSR is there. So the Allison Transmission, the Timkens, the Dorman Products, the Donaldson Company. Who else am I missing? Oshkosh Corporation is another good one. Those are the types of folks. Atmus, I think we’ve added in there now too.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: Garrett.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Motion, they’re still probably 70% to 80% passenger car. They’re still pretty heavy in that space.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: We took Gates Industrial off.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Gates is one that we probably need to add. Gates is another good example. These are ones that they’re serving a lot of different markets. They don’t have a heavy exposure into one different industry. They generally have a good portion of aftermarket business. They’re global in nature. I think those are, I’ve got my own list. I can add more to it. I’ve got like nine or ten that I think are what I would consider our core comps in that space. I think those were five of them I just brought it off the top of my head.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: Great. Brady and Chris, we really appreciate your time. Good luck.

Brady Ericson, President and CEO, PHINIA: Great. Thank you very much.

William, Analyst: Thank you.

Chris Gropp, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, PHINIA: Thanks, guys.

Unidentified speaker, auto analyst: All right. Good luck to you too.

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