All right. Welcome back, everyone. I'm very pleased to have Dana Incorporated up as our next company here at the UBS Auto Conference. Pleased to have Bruce McDonald, Chairman and CEO, and Byron Foster, Incoming CEO as of July 1. July 1, that's right. Yeah. Right around the corner. That's right. A lot I want to get to here. Why don't we just start with sort of current trends, sort of what you're seeing in the business, and really from an end market perspective. I know you've laid out some of your assumptions for different end markets. Yeah. Light vehicle, sort of light truck, commercial vehicle, on your first quarter earnings call. We've seen some changes to third-party forecasts, at least on the light vehicle side. We had some good orders, numbers. Yeah. On commercial trucks. Maybe you could just sort of update us sort of what you're seeing currently in the market. Sure Where sort of the push and pull is really for the balance of the year on demand side. Yeah, sure. I'll start on the light vehicle side. We're seeing good, steady production from our customers, our large programs. We're actually seeing some slight volume uptick, the markets seem to be pretty stable and resilient despite kind of all the other things going on around the world. We feel pretty good about the demand on the light vehicle sides. Our plants are humming along right now in Q2, and we expect that should continue into kind of the back half of the year. On the commercial vehicle side, on the Class 8, we're starting to see pickup in demand there. We're starting to see that come through in our orders, and we expect kind of in the back half of the year that there should be some uptick there. You expected that already, though, in your initial guidance, or is it sort of trending a little bit? That's trending a little bit ahead of kind of what we thought initially. For us, just from a mix standpoint, we're a larger player kind of in the medium duty space. Right. We're seeing that continue to be flat-ish to soft, but some uptick on the Class 8. Net-net, there should be some slight upside for us from a volume side in the back half of the year. Sticking with in the commercial vehicle segment with some of the international markets, and whether it's Europe or China or South America. Yeah, the larger markets for us are really North America. South America is fairly large. South America's kind of soft. North America, we're seeing the pickup, and Europe remains kind of soft, but not a big region for us. When you reported, I think you sort of were indicating maybe towards the higher end of the guidance range. Yeah. Is it really just sort of volume that's sort of going to determine here where you sort of play out within that range or even above that range? Yeah, I think in terms of continuing to see us at the top end of that range, we're looking for volume to continue to be stable. We're seeing some good signs here in the quarter. The CV pickup that I mentioned earlier, should that really kind of continue to come through and the supply base be able to react to that could present some upside to us. We've got a lot of activity around continuing to drive cost in the business. To the extent we can accelerate some of that, all combined, that would lead us kind of continue to the higher end of the range. Yeah. On the cost-saving side, you've done a really good job there. Yeah Been able to sort of take cost out. Yep. I think as you sort of move through the year, you start to get up against some of the comps, if you will, from when you started to take more costs out there. How should we think about that progressing? One of the things we've talked about in the past is how you're continually evaluating the business and always sort of looking for more and more opportunities. Absolutely. Where do we stand on that? I would say a couple of things on the cost side. First, so far year to date, we've taken out $35 million of a plan to get $65 out. We're on track to deliver that $65 for the year. To your point, Joe, you never stop on the cost optimization piece. When we laid out our Dana 2030 plan, we talked about an incremental $65 million of costs that we're looking to take out over the plan period. We're constantly working on that. If you think about cost in a broader sense in terms of our in-plant productivity, our purchasing savings, I mean, teams have roadmaps in place to deliver that, they're constantly looking for ways to kind of over-deliver in that regard, things like automation, a big effort on automation to drive efficiency, improve quality, improve safety in the plants, and we're actively driving those projects and trying to go as quickly as we can. Since you brought up automation, and it's obviously something that you've talked about in the past, but maybe you could sort of just talk to us a little bit about your approach. Are there things you automate in one plant that you then see this has applicability to a different plant, and you could sort of scale it, and then vice versa, there might be other areas? You want to jump in? Yeah. I would say, well, first of all, if you compare our manufacturing operations to, let's just say, an investment grade manufacturer, I'm not counting automotive, but just in general. We were capital constrained, and so we're behind. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit, but if you were to go into our manufacturing operations, some of our plants, it's well over half the people have jobs where they're loading or unloading a machine, and that is very low level. Yeah Replacing two or three heads, because it's two or three shifts a day. Right. That's why we have such a high payback. There's a lot of opportunity, and I'm talking about not loading something like this into a machine. We have lift-assisted things, and it's banging around. It's not safe. It's ergonomically a challenge. It's not jobs that our union colleagues like to do. We haven't had any pushback in terms of, "Hey, this is where we're deploying automation. Yeah. It's not Tesla robots running around our plant. Yeah, exactly. I would just add to Bruce's points. One, when we find an opportunity, we're very much looking to share that across plants, right, that have similar operations. We have a roadmap of best practices from a deployment standpoint that we can leverage so we don't have to relearn this every time we want to deploy for a specific operation. The other opportunity is just material handling. Yeah. That's a big one for us. The movement of material through automated AGV-type technology is a huge opportunity for us. I think those investments are sort of contemplated in your CapEx budget. Yes. How long do you think this process could take to get? Yeah The plants up to more acceptable levels to put it concretely? I think in our numbers that we put in a Capital Markets Day, I think we got about $175 million of capital here over a three-year period. Say it's 60-ish million a year type thing. Yeah. To Byron's point, one of the things that we are finding is we've got a team that's going out and identifying projects by plant and things like that. Once we go into a plant and implement, then the plants are coming back and saying, "Hey, having now lived with this, we got some other ideas." It wouldn't surprise me if we tick that number up. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's helpful. I guess not so much on the cost side, or maybe it is, but it might also just be some other factors here. I think one of the other things you mentioned at the Capital Markets Day was there's a number of parts or products that are just not profitable today. Yeah. Maybe we can talk about the effort to either get them profitable, whether automation or other aspects. Right Are a part of that, or whether they make sense to remain in the portfolio. In the Capital Markets Day, we gave an example of one of our sealing plants that that particular plant has quite a few SKUs. I think it's close to 600 SKUs. We've been going deep into part level, SKU level profitability, and understanding what our margin profile looks like. For those parts that are not meeting our hurdles, we then have to unpack, okay, what's driving it? Is it a design issue? Is it material? Is it pricing, scrap throughput? We go through all those to see what leverage we might be able to pull to get the parts to an acceptable level of profitability. If we can't find a path, be it on a set of SKUs, on a product line, on a set of business with a particular customer, or what have you, then we have those discussions, and we're more than willing to exit. Each product line, each SKU, each plant has to get to a level of sustainability from a profitability standpoint, and we're just attacking that in a very aggressive way. Yeah. Just to put it in perspective, when you look at our numbers, like our quarterly bridges, and you're seeing the contribution margin that we have flowing through on the volume, because we've got repriced product going through here. This year it's in the $30 million-$40 million benefits in our plan as a result of that stuff. Yeah. It's not, I think in your pre-questions, you were sort of asking about the timeframe. To the extent it's with, let's just say Ford, and we got a lot of that other Ford business, we're more constrained. What we're finding is we've got a lot of other customers, some competitors, where it's fairly easy for us to implement the actions on a pretty timely basis. As you go through that process, are there some parts where maybe you think you need to reconsider whether it's something you continue to do, or you think these are all? Nothing. Yes, for sure. We have some products where the volume is very low. It's kind of niche to a particular. Some of that pruning, if you will definitely result in some products just coming out of the portfolio. Yeah. Which is okay. Yeah. Turning back to the Capital Markets Day, and you highlighted a number of, let's say, growth vectors for. Yeah The company. One was the backlog I guess let's say your existing traditional light vehicle and commercial vehicle business. I think especially with the Ram/Dakota win you announced last quarter, most of that seems in the books. maybe you could talk a little about that and also some of the other drivers here, I guess the two I'd want to focus most on are, one, some of the adjacencies, like you mentioned. Yeah A&D or maybe powersports to the aftermarket. I know that seems to be a pretty sizable addressable market for you. Yeah. Maybe I'll start and Bruce can chime in. On the traditional side, we were obviously very excited with the Dakota win. It fits right into our strategy, right into our sweet spot. It's in our current manufacturing footprint, a lot of carryover products. It made a lot of sense for us and for Stellantis. We're excited about that, and that obviously plugs a big hole in terms of backlog. We are not done yet. We have a list of great opportunities with our customers. I think in general, our team's ability to execute from a quality, delivery, overall performance, we have green scorecards. Our customers are looking for opportunities to grow with us. There will be more to come on the traditional growth side, even though that plugged a big part of our roadmap. The team's not done. Just on that front. That means it could fall within certainly the 2030 timeframe. Right. Are there still opportunities that could be even a little bit more near-term, similar to Dakota, or that sort of mostly? Well, I think, for it to hit the business in the 2030 timeframe, we need to deliver wins in the next, let's say, 12 to 18 months, right? Yeah. For it to launch in that timeframe. Yeah. Yes, there are other active opportunities that we're chasing that hopefully we'll be able to deliver some good news on those within the next 12 months. Okay. That work stream is well underway. Teams are focused there. On the commercial vehicle side, in addition to hopefully what continues to be tailwind from the overall market, we're really doubling up our efforts in terms of being in the field, talking to the fleets, talking to the dealers to create that pull-through for the Dana solutions. Even though it's early days, we're starting to see some nice wins on that front. Again, our traditional commercial vehicle business should benefit from both of those efforts. You want to take maybe the aftermarket? The aftermarket, I think, where we're sort of counting on a $200 million type opportunity here. The biggest single one is on the North American sealing side of our business. This is where we have a unique value proposition in the market in that we are an OE gasket supplier, and we're competing against people that aren't. What we're seeing, it's a relatively inexpensive part when you're doing an engine repair to use an OE quality part. We've got excellent demand, I'll say, from the big box retailers. The way that tends to work, Joe, is if I used maybe AutoZone as an example, they've got a number of regional DCs and they typically would say, okay, you can have this in this DC and prove ourself and to the extent we're successful, they will look to get incremental DCs. We've got our foot in the door. This is a business we really weren't in, say, two or three years ago. We're probably at a $40 million type run rate right now. We're in AutoZone, O'Reilly's. Vance Vance. NAPA. Having some discussions with NAPA. to try and lock them in. We've been very pleased with the pull that we're seeing on it, and right now, I would say we're internally constrained on our ability to take business on. We're going to have to add some distribution capacity in the U.S., and that's an investment that Byron and the team are looking at right now. Yeah. Just to refresh my memory, this was something you used to do. You sort of lost the license. Yeah Re-entering. We sold a business. Yeah With a 10-year non-compete, and now that expired six or seven years. Craig probably remembers. He was the only one that was around back then. He's the Dana historian. We didn't jump back into it, and given the margin profile on it's very attractive. We have- It was more of a non-compete. It wasn't like someone else was making product with your name on it. No. Okay. No. This is a market where we've got 35, 40% share in Europe, and that's our entitlement here in the U.S. We're very confident in that one, and so far so good in terms of the effort building it up. Okay. The other piece, relative to growth, right, we have a whole work stream around adjacent markets, Applied Technologies we call it. Taking the Dana product capabilities, technologies into new spaces. We've talked about powersports as an example of being one where the customers there are looking for more automotive-grade, higher quality, more robust solutions for their vehicles. They're looking for hybridization solutions. Local supply Local supply. All fits right into the sweet spot of what we can provide from a solution standpoint. We've been engaged with the top customers in that space at their CTO levels. We've got a number of RFQ opportunities in front of us. That one is real. It's gaining momentum, and that's going to turn into something tangible for us. Defense is the other one we've talked a bit about. We all kind of understand the ramp-up in demand relative to defense. Again, there we've got solutions that are relatively off the shelf. Just kind of have to beef up some of the solutions we have because they're looking for off-the-shelf solutions that are already kind of validated and that can kind of get to market quicker. Again, there we've got great traction with a number of the players in that space, and it's tangible turning into real opportunities for us, yeah. The reason I wanted to sort of recant a lot of that work. Yeah At the Analyst Day is to sort of really segue into one of the big themes that investors are sort of looking at in autos here, which is what core competencies do companies have that might have applicability to other use cases. Yeah I think the examples you gave here. Like okay, well, we're good on trucks and commercial vehicles. Are there applications in military powersports? Clear example of that, right? Taking something you know how to do, finding a new end market. Yeah. We just had a note out that sort of looked through all the portfolios, and I think one of the areas that we highlighted, and I'd be curious to sort of hear your views on this, is battery cooling plates, right? Yeah. Clearly you do some of that in your business for electric vehicle batteries. That's right. Batteries are in greater demand beyond electric vehicles in terms of energy storage systems. Maybe you could just sort of talk about what you do there, your core competencies, how portable is that type of technology, and do you see demand for your product in some of these other areas? Is there anything else in your portfolio that might also have some applicability? Yeah. We can tag team it. Yeah. Go ahead. I'll start. Just from a baseline capability, when we talk about the Dana product portfolio, we talk about thermal products. That can be helping regulate temperature of an ICE engine solution to the EV space, which is where we've spent a lot of time developing capability to cool batteries in an electric vehicle. That product is just what it sounds like. It is a plate that is kind of sandwiched between the batteries to regulate temperature, and there's a lot of intellectual property behind our solutions there. We're on several key platforms with some of our larger customers, albeit at lower volumes than we initially thought. We are in production with that technology today. I'll let Bruce take kind of how we're starting to look at how we might be able to apply that to some of these other markets that you're talking about, Joe. Yeah. As it relates to BESS, which is the buzzword right now. Right. In that space, we think the battery cooling plate opportunity right now is about $2 billion, like size of market. We have a stamped product, so basically we stamp it, and that creates the channels that we put coolant through, as opposed to cast products, which are the primary product in the market today. There's some technical benefits in terms of heat dissipation of our product versus the cast ones, and we think as the next generation chips come out, we have a very good solution. We are talking to people in this space as a tier one supplier, but it's in the prototype, technical solution, engineer to engineer. We're not at a point where we're quoting things or going to win new business. When Byron talked about our Applied Technologies growth initiative, we have five of them, and as we said, our Capital Markets Day, look, this isn't a one-and-done process in looking at our capability in what market. From the Capital Markets Day to today, this is an opportunity that's moving pretty quickly, and we are having discussions with folks in the data center space and some of the chip suppliers. It wasn't. Things are moving. Really considered in your Capital Markets Day No I assume. Yeah. Right. I guess just bigger picture then, because like you said, things are moving very quickly. All of a sudden, there's an influx of demand. You have, I would say, within Dana, probably a lot of sort of core technology, and whether it's BESS or data centers or powersports, I'm just curious how you organize internally. Is there some sort of team that's responsible for almost incubation of ideas, saying, "Hey, we could do this. This is very applicable towards potentially this new use case. Let's see if we could sort of come up with a product and become differentiated. That's a pretty good description of our process, Joe. What's important is that you got to commit and dedicate the team and resources if we say, "Hey, we want to grow in this market." First we did the legwork of what's possible, what markets could have an opportunity where Dana could bring solutions to, and got down to this initial list, and we're continuously looking to refresh that as we explore those markets and see if there's something there or not. We have dedicated teams, and this all starts out, to Bruce's point, engineer to engineer. Do we have a technical solution that makes sense? Do we have a value proposition that's interesting for the customer? As these markets and opportunities become real, we will kind of build the team around those accordingly. Yeah, we've maybe done ourselves a little bit of a disservice because we've really focused on a window to 2030. And like we- Some of these- Like we said. Yeah A great example for that would be, our Powersports Initiative that we talked about. We really saw that opportunity is around drive shafts. Propshafts and things like that, replacing, say, old technology, Chinese-based suppliers and things like that. As we've gone into those discussions, what we've found is a lot of opportunities for hybridization. Looking at our high-performance transmission- Business, we're now doing demonstrator vehicles for a couple of the powersports manufacturers on a hybrid product. Almost like a range extended, so a couple of miles of battery-only drive. Those would be things coming in beyond, like in 2030 tail end and beyond. We're not limiting it to just a five-year window. We're looking for market opportunities that are attractive and at accretive margins. The bogey that we've kind of given to our Applied Technologies group is 25%-type EBITDA margins. Threshold type thing. You mentioned, maybe turning the conversation just to plates again, just as an example here. Obviously the volumes didn't materialize as I think everyone sort of planned and capacitized for. Certainly planned for, I guess the question is, was it also sort of capacitized for? Like, is that something where you do have some excess capacity on that front now? If you do find a new use case. Cooling plates, we definitely do. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something that obviously it would require some investment, some retooling potentially, but there's some of it. Yeah Is definitely- Some of the core capacity is there that could be redeployed. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. I guess it's TBD, since I don't know, do you think it can be sort of fairly fungible and flexible, that you could sort of switch back and forth, let's say in EV or BESS demand if need be? Well, our technical teams are looking to, as they explore this opportunity to see what solutions could make sense. They're doing that with the understanding of the capacity we have in place, and can we leverage that process in whatever solutions we may come up with. We'll see. I mean, again, TBD. Ideally, this capacity could be fungible and we could. Yeah Leverage kind of both markets. That would be ideal. we're still in kind of in-. I think one kind of way to think about, I'm not the smartest guy in the room in terms of this topic, but as it relates to our base battery cooling plate business today, the market is moving away from a cooling plate on a cell that's two by three, to something that's the size of these screens or a piece of plywood. It'd be one plate for all the cells. We will have to invest in capacity for our existing business, which will free up, because our machines can't make something that big. We think the size that we have will fit the market demand if it comes through. I don't see it being a very capital-intensive initiative for us. Yeah. Okay. Are there other areas that maybe, even since the analyst day, as you sort of take a longer lens and longer scope beyond 2030 that may come into purview? Like, for instance, I think you're probably pretty good at gearing and stuff like that. Like in robotics, might there be use cases for some of your know-how? We haven't really I would say what we have in front of us right now is kind of where we have the team. Okay Focused. The big opportunity is, in terms of the core capabilities around gearing as an example, are in these markets that we talked about because they bring pretty good scale and size of opportunity. On the thermal front, beginning to explore, one, as the vehicle architectures change, we think the need for cooling in EVs is going to increase, and so we're working on some solutions as kind of the various computer modules come together into larger pieces where we would cool that. We're again obviously starting to explore the BESS space and data centers, at a very initial stage, I would say. Okay. I guess just in terms of ease of entry into that market, should we sort of think about it as maybe some customers that are already customers on a vehicle side that might also be exploring some of these opportunities, or is it broader than that? I think it has the potential to be both. Yeah. Obviously, some of our customers are starting to explore that. We have relationships there. They know us, they know our technology. We'll see kind of where that could potentially go. There's going to be new players. Yeah. Where we're building contact, building relationships, and starting to talk about what the needs are and what solutions we might have. We've got teams kind of working that space. I guess just the last question on this is like, when you have again, maybe these conversations are very early stages, but as you sort of continue to sort of advance that, is the conversation centered around, 'Hey, we have capacity, we could do this, here's what we know how to do?' Or is it more around, like what you mentioned before, where you have a stamp for sort of casting product, which is like we actually think we have a better mousetrap here? Yeah, it's the latter. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's definitely the improved heat dissipation from our product and the ability to have more surface contact or maybe mold it around a chip instead of just touching part of it. It's really about solving a problem. Exactly. Okay. Let's turn the page to, Bruce, I know one of your favorite topics here over the past couple of years, which is sort of capital allocation. Obviously you sort of laid out some free cash flow targets for the year, some longer term sort of capital returns, as well. Maybe you could sort of just refresh us, in terms of. Sure How you think about not only the cash generation, but in terms of how you want to sort of use that capital. I am, I guess, just curious a little bit, as we sort of start to think about and synthesize some of these potential new opportunities, it sounds like it's pretty capital light. I just wanted to make sure it's sort of not. Yeah Significant enough or is it significant for as you may have to reevaluate? No Some other priorities. No. What we laid out our Capital Markets Day was $2 billion of cumulative buybacks by 2030, and that's what we sort of committed to so far. That would leave us with zero net debt. At the end, and that's not our desire. We've sort of said, look, we want to be about one times leverage to the cycle. I think in hindsight, we had a debate with a lot of folks outside the company around to what extent would we see multiple expansion by reducing our risk profile. we've moved up, despite the fact we sold our off-highway business. I think our efforts in terms of improving our margin and our balance sheet, we've definitely been rewarded with multiple expansion. We think it's prudent for us to stay within that one times to ride out the cycle. We've got in the numbers. You're saying, but that would give you more than $2 billion of capacity. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't say, "Hey, here's every nickel. Right. To the extent our business continues to perform well, as our leverage declines, then we certainly have the opportunity to pull it forward and expand it in an aggregate sense. Okay. This year we're sort of talking about, we've committed to $300 million of buybacks, of which we're probably about halfway done right now, where we sit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. One of the other parts of the Capital Markets Day was sort of market share gains, right, across sort of a different- Sort of array of categories. What is sort of the factor that you think is sort of driving these sort of share gains from competitors into yourself? Yeah. Obviously things are always sort of some combination of price, performance. Right And durability, Yeah. Well, I think the answer is slightly different depending on which segment we're talking about. Aftermarket, which we talked a little bit about earlier, is about reintroducing a brand that is recognized, that we have great kind of vehicle coverage for, and where our customers are looking for an alternative solution, and they're willing to give us that shot and give us some DCs and we're performing and we expect that piece will grow. I think on the commercial vehicle side, there it's about really getting the Dana value proposition into the market. It's serving customers that we have underserved in terms of being in front of the fleets, in front of the dealers, and obviously continuing to execute with our OEM customers. There, again, people are looking for an alternative and giving Dana a shot, and we're seeing some great kind of early wins in that regard. Then in our traditional space, the light vehicle space, we were able to deliver the Dakota Program because our teams come to work every day and execute in a fantastic way, high quality, deal with a lot of complexities, supplying the Jeep platform, and have gained the customer's confidence that we can do more with them. I think for me, it all starts with our teams that execute every day in a world-class way, and then our customers want to figure out how to grow us. Yeah, maybe just double clicking on the CV opportunity there, Joe. We have brand new world-class axle, CV axle plant that we built in Escobedo, in Mexico. It's state-of-the-art. Customers are blown away with it, because I don't think there's been a new CV axle plant. In a long time. Right Our customers right now are very worried about the inevitable supply chain. Can the supply base keep up with demand? It happens every cycle, and we've got surplus capacity, so that's helping us. I would also say our quality and our cost base, we think we have an advantage. I think a combination of, like Byron said, us focusing on the dealers and the fleets, which we have not done in the past, could create additional demand, as well as our ability to add capacity, a reliable capacity, is going to help us gain share. Maybe just to close here. Late last week, I'm sure we all saw the article about the government pushing for certain U.S. requirement and contents on USMCA. I don't think, really, that's surprising that the government was sort of pushing for it. I don't know whether 50% is. Right Ultimately going to be the right number, but maybe you could sort of talk about, because I think you've already internally, you already have a decent U.S. footprint. I think you've also sort of made some efforts to sort of try to get more U.S. content to help your customers. For sure. An edict by the automakers to the suppliers. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you think USMCA might evolve and how Dana's positioned within that. Well, I'll stay away from trying to predict what the final solution looks like. I will say to your point that, because of the nature of our product being kind of large, we're within a close radius of most of our OEM customers for the final product. Right. The component footprint, a lot of that is U.S., but also kind of global. Through this whole kind of tariff piece, we have worked that global supply chain to optimize it, to leverage USMCA as best we can, and to partner with our customers on what the right long-term economic solutions are. When the new rules come out, we'll adapt and continue to evolve and get to the best low-cost solution for us and our customers. Where- I would, let me just add on that a little bit, because for me, it's not something that keeps me awake at night. Maybe because I'll be leaving soon. No, I would just say to our customers' credit here in the U.S., they have done an amazing job working. Here, there's tariffs- Yeah Chaotic. They've done an amazing job working with the administration Commerce Department on, "Hey, let's try and figure this. We're willing to go there, but we got to have a proper path to get there." They've done a great job up to this point in time, and I think, I'm very confident they will do it again. Yeah, I think that's a fair point and We don't know all the details of the larger potential agreement. Yeah I think that's a totally fair point, and I would echo your view, Bruce, that I don't think it's the administration's intention here to sort of inflict pain on this industry here. Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, I think with that, we're perfect out of time, so. Perfect. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, thanks for joining us today. Bruce. Thank you. See you off. Thank you. I don't know, is this your last conference officially, or? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well- Thank you. Take care. All right, great. Thank you.