Thank you so much for coming. I want to also thank American Axle for being really the best partner we've had, I think, in this conference. I think you've been here every year for maybe the last 19 years that I've been lucky enough to be down in Boca Raton in the winter. Again, I'm Doug Karson. I'm the Automotive Analyst here at Bank of America. With us from the company, we have Chris May, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Shannon Curry, the Vice President and Treasurer. As many know, American Axle is a Tier 1 Global Automotive and Mobility Supplier. It designs, Engineers, and manufacturers driveline and metal forming technologies to support ICE engines, also electric and EV. I've been to some of their plants. They're really the best-run plants I've ever seen. They're really an excellent manufacturer, and we're looking forward to hearing their story across ICE as well as what they've done in EV. Without further ado, I'm gonna- I turn it over to Chris. All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Doug. First of all, I'd like to thank Bank of America and, and you as well, Doug, for hosting this conference. It's a great event to come to every year, talk about our story, hear what's on your mind, take some Q&A, and we'll go from there. Before I begin, though, I do direct your attention to our forward-looking statements. You can find them on our presentation, but also on our website. So for those of you who know us very well, this will be a little repetitive here, this first slide, but those of you that are new to our story or a refresher, we're about a $6 billion global Tier 1 automotive supplier. We run basically two business segments: our driveline business segment, which is about $4 billion in sales, and our metal forming business segment, which is about $2 billion in sales. If you think of our company, you probably think more of our driveline business segment. That's the one that provides axles to full-size trucks and mid-size trucks and crossover vehicles and SUVs, as well as sort of the tip of the spear of our leading driveline systems for the electrification pivot. On the metal forming side, we are the largest automotive forger in the world, with a concentration in North America and Europe. Supplies many different components to many different customers and is also starting to grow on the electrification side through providing components into some new customers, as well as new platforms that our OEMs are launching. About a month ago, we released our third quarter financial results. I'm not gonna cover all those details here with you today. You can go check out on our website and read the transcript. Obviously, we were impacted by the UAW work stoppage inside the third quarter, more heavily into the fourth quarter, as they were down for the significant portion of October and a little bit of November. We continued to experience customer volatility inside of the third quarter at some of our key customers, and also had some performance challenges that we talked about on our earnings call. But at the end of the day, very strong cash flow quarter for the company, one of the top three cash flow-performing quarters of the last three years, at $136 million of Adjusted Free Cash Flow. In relation to our performance, in relation to how we see through the end of the year, we also provided this performance overview, some of the challenges that we faced, some of the topics that are embedded in our financial results, and how we see these playing out over the next couple of quarters. So if you look on this slide, it's a pretty important slide to understand. As I mentioned, we continue to have production volatility, even pre-strike. Experienced that again heavily in the third quarter. Hopefully, going forward, we see some stability from that standpoint as we enter into next year. Obviously, that's up to our customers. The UAW work stoppage has now concluded. Plants are coming back up online. Most are back at full rate. A couple continue to sort of build back to rate, but we had expected this to be complete here by the end of the year, back to sort of pre-strike run rates across the board for our customers. The two other items that we're working on here in the back half of the year and early part of next year is economic recoveries from our customers. We've made good progress on that standpoint. We've got a couple customers yet to conclude negotiations with, so work to do between here and the end of the year. And you can see here we expect that conclusion through the end of the year and into a little bit part of the first quarter of next year. And then lastly, some of the operational challenges that we faced throughout the quarter. If anyone has any questions on that, we could talk about during Q&A, but you can see here listed some of those challenges that impacted our performance. Well underway, starting to move the needle in terms of performance improvements. Again, we would expect this improvement trend to continue each and every month as we get into the first quarter of next year. Okay. We talked financials in our quarter, but we also had some pretty exciting business updates for four key business awards that we won in the last 90 days. What I think you'll find very interesting about this slide is two of them are electrification related, two of them are ICE related. Most of these are new customers to us, and we continue to expand that product portfolio on the electrification side, but also continue to win business on our ICE business. We'll talk a little bit more about the electrification business in some upcoming slides and how we are moving into some of these markets through our different segments and different customers and our different products. We also provided a financial outlook for 2023 this year. You can see the numbers. These were updated at this point in time, $6 billion-$6.1 billion of revenues, Adjusted EBITDA $660 million-$685 million, and a continued strong free cash flow of $200 million-$215 million. All in for the UAW work stoppage, we expect a sales impact of a loss of sales of $70 million-$100 million. Put in perspective, in the third quarter, it was $15 million. So as I mentioned previously, the bulk of that impact will fall on us in the fourth quarter, but we're back up and running. Our customers are up and running, and as you know, our customers' unions have ratified those contracts. So moving forward with that and hopefully putting that in the rearview mirror. And I know of interest, especially to this group here, this is our debt maturity profile. You can see we're in really good shape. Average life of our debt, just shy of five years. A very healthy maturity standpoint. Really have no maturities due until 2026, so a nice, clear runway. We continue to deploy our capital and cash flow to pay down this debt. Since our acquisition of MPG in 2017, we have paid down over $1.4 billion of debt. We paid another $50 million again here this year. We paused in the third quarter ahead of the UAW strikes, but as you know, we had strong free cash flow in the third quarter, and we'll continue to focus on our debt reduction activities going forward. But as I mentioned, from a debt maturity profile, we're in pretty good shape. And And then lastly, before we kind of talk about electrification, our sustainability report, I know this is a topic of interest to many. We published our 2022 report earlier this year in 2023. I would encourage you to go out there and read it. We talk about our goals, we talk about our objectives, and how we are tracking and moving towards this mission from a sustainability perspective. Okay, let's transition now, talk a little bit about, maybe our underappreciated technology and how we're making this pivot into electrification, how we're facing off into the market, how we're going to grow this business, in addition to maintaining a solid ICE product portfolio into the foreseeable future. So I think this is one of the most, in my opinion, one of the most interesting slides we have, and we think about growth from an electrification standpoint going forward. We see that occurring in one of two ways: a content per vehicle growth, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes, but also growth as it relates to segments. So if you think about American Axle today, go back to who we are. We support large trucks and crossover vehicles, and those are the platforms you can see in the lower left-hand corner of this slide. As we have now moved into our platform approach from an electrification perspective, these drive units, this is from a drive unit perspective, are now starting to win business into many different segments out in the auto space, from passenger cars, front-wheel passenger cars, chassis platforms, small vans, microcars, skateboard applications, and we are winning business in many of these new segments to which our driveline business did not really participate in previously. So we see this as an underappreciated growth element as the automobile space moves into electrification, and I think this is a really powerful slide. Keep this one in mind as we continue to go forward. In addition, at our CES show earlier this year, we talked about our served market share, and one key element in our served market share was a piece that was related to, or I'll call it a niche, related to the e-Beam or electric beam axle business. So think about e-Beam business that goes on larger trucks, SUVs, other applications. Think about in comparison to our ICE business of a beam axle. So this is where we see this niche playing to our advantage as we make this pivot into electrification. And I think a picture is worth a thousand words, because up on the screen, on the left is a traditional ICE beam axle driving around on literally millions of pickup trucks and SUVs around the nation today. On the right is an e-Beam axle. It's a depiction of some of these awards that we have won, and you'll see the many similarities just physically looking at it, but also many of the characteristics that are listed in the middle of this slide. This segment of the electrification space has less competition from a supplier standpoint. It's obviously very critical to the OEM success in many of these platforms, much of which we believe will be done on the outside in the supply base. And if you follow many of our recent award announcements, they have been in this e-Beam space. So this is what we do. This is the foundation of the company today from our ICE business. You can see us now making that pivot to electrification in a very critical and sizable niche inside of the electrification space. So I mentioned segments. I talked about beam axle business, but also content per vehicle opportunity is also another growth engine inside of our pivot to electrification. So if you think about it today, by way of perspective, on an ICE vehicle, our average North American full-size truck applications have around $1,500-$1,600 of content per vehicle if we're the primary driveline supplier. If we are the component supplier, so we supply a whole host of many different components into many different vehicles, we could be up to about $500 of content per vehicle. In the electrification space, if we are the primary drive supplier or an e-drive supplier, our content per vehicle can be up to $2,500, and you'll see here it says, "Plus." The experience, especially on these beam axles, I would call it plus, plus, a multitude of, 2,500 times X. So high content per vehicle opportunities for us here. If we are a component supplier, if an OEM chooses to do this product in-house, we supply many different components, primarily through our metal forming operations. We'll have a very similar content per vehicle as a component supplier of about $500. So segment growth, content per vehicle growth, are facing us here over the next 10-15 years as we make this pivot into electrification. So we put our money where our mouth is. This is a summary of many of the awards that we have won in terms of new business that we have announced over the last couple of years. Most recently, this year, several on the e-beam space, probably the most prominent one earlier this year, with a large award with Stellantis. We've announced several awards in the India marketplace, in the China marketplace. We support drive units with one of our partners, Inovance, today in production. Obviously, we announced also last year on the AMG product that's now out into production and expanding its different vehicle sets that that will be applied to. So we continue to grow there, and we continue to have several announcements on the component space, supplying several different global OEMs as they're making their pivot into electrification. So we talked about our served market earlier. It's about $20 billion-$30 billion is our served market by 2030 at current estimates of electrification penetration. Our goal is to earn about 10% of that served market, and that's in line. That's in line with our share of our ICE business, and the awards that we're winning are lining us up nicely to achieve that. So how do we get there? Clearly, it's our heritage of quality and operational excellence, but it's also this innovation, our platform design, pushing us into new segments, and also leveraging that niche in the e-Beam Axle business. So we see a nice runway to achieving our goal by 2030 to conquest our share of an electrification market. So that said, you know, at the end of the day, you know, how do we create value inside the company? You know, our goal for CEO is here, he would tell you, he is driving this company to be, agnostic to propulsion market changes, meaning we can move with the market dynamics of ICE. We have a solid foundation from an ICE perspective and also a growing and budding electrification business. The customer and the market will ultimately draw volumes. We're here to provide, whatever product they choose. So number one, we talked about our electrification. Number two, on our existing ICE business, it's been very important for us to secure the next generation of product that we supply into these vehicles. So we've made announcements over the last couple of years. We're the next generation on the Ram, the next generation on one of our largest truck platforms, and we continue to bring those next-generation platforms under contract, which will be key to being agnostic to the market and securing our business for a very long time to come. Obviously, leveraging on our operation, systems to deliver outstanding financial results over time and continuing to focus on strengthening the balance sheet. So with that, concludes the sort of, I'll call formal remarks. Doug, I think, we'll pause there and maybe turn it over to you or the audience, and anyone who has any questions, so. Yeah, maybe I'll kick us off with a few on the ICE side. So, roughly 40% of your $725 million in backlog is related to electrification. How do you see that trend growing? I think the OEMs just recently pivoted a little bit, stating that maybe some of the demand for EVs is kind a, you know, normalizing a bit. But it's still a very important, you know, part of the business. Tell me a little about the backlog, how you're thinking about it, and then maybe I'm gonna ask some questions around the e-Beam business. Sure. Yeah, from a backlog perspective, you mentioned 40% of our current backlog is associated with product of electrification, and that's product that's in production today and continuing to grow through our backlog period. We have been very conscious in growing that backlog element. It was 15% just a couple of years ago of our backlog. So through some of the items that I talked about in my prepared comments, we've been winning business in that space, and you can see that manifesting itself through our backlog. And I know, you mentioned some of the market commentary, people sort of reflecting on volumes and take rates and the pivot speed. You know, we still see this as an area of growth over time, so it's important for us to continue to participate in this segment, in a balanced way, as I mentioned, to be agnostic to propulsion. So our core franchise of our ICE business is important, but also winning some of these new contracts and electrification to participate in that growth is very important. So I think some of the commentary you've heard from customers, we've heard the same commentary over the last, call it 60-90 days. You know, I think it's taking a reflection of where the market demand is now, talking about some of the challenges through the course of this pivot and the timing with that. But over an extended period of time, you know, we believe this is an area of growth for the company. You had a nice slide up there with some of the, the recent wins. The, the first quarter with Stellantis, and I think, in the third quarter, you announced that it were with Skywell Auto, support electric van program. You know, if you could just give us a little flavor on how do you win those contracts? Were they very competitive? And then the thought, these are very complicated products that I don't think OEMs really want to be vertically integrating themselves, and they're relying on you to produce them. But you're thinking about some of the kind of the market dynamics of it, and who you compete with for some of these products would be helpful. Yeah, I think you got a couple of questions in there. Let's take one at a time. In terms of, you know, how are we winning the business that we've- Yeah have won? I think we try to distinguish ourselves, you know, first and foremost, from an engineering perspective, being able to provide a value proposition to our customer, to have outstanding support in design and development through some of these different propulsion systems that we're providing, whether they're EDUs or E-Beam axles. And then in case of where we're winning on the component side for electrification, it's really our capability set in North America and Europe that's supporting some of these customers. Some of these gearings and assemblies inside that we're selling from a component standpoint, high tolerances, not a lot of people can do it. We, we do them by the millions to support some of our ICE business today. So we have the installed capability, we have the installed capacity, and we have the strength and quality to give them the gearing that they need for the component side of their business. So that's sort of the attraction side for winning of that new business. And when you think about the... I think another element of your question was competition. So if you fragment the driveline space into sort of EDUs and E-beam axles, and as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, you know, our view on the competition on the E-beam axle side, there's far fewer than you experience on the EDU side. There is a fair amount of competition on the EDU side, even some nontraditional competition that we haven't seen on the internal combustion engine application side. So it's robust from a competitive standpoint. This is where design and capability, you know, will allow you to win the day and obviously, appropriate price and value proposition to the customer. So you're in sort of a more competitive environment. On the E-beam, you're really starting now to bring your capabilities, your vertical integration, your know-how, heat management, vibration and harshness controls inside of these E-beam axles that not everyone can do, and you can see the competition base in there is much smaller. So we'll conquest a nice share in that. And then on the component side, a lot of different component suppliers around the world, but again, holding those tolerances on gears, doing this day in and day out by literally the millions of gears every day, gives us a competitive advantage in that space as well from a component standpoint. Right. For the calibration on that is very, very fine. You know, if I just think about it, if I'm a new EV manufacturer and I have a clean sheet of paper, and I'm looking to build, you know, the next Tesla, do I build an axle myself? Do I call you up and say, "Can you help me with my design?" How have you seen that play out with all these little EV companies that are popping up everywhere? Yeah, no, we've experienced both, to be frank. So, I think it was a year ago, we announced, you know, component wins to NIO in China, who is- Mm-hmm Called one of those new, EV applications, where they wanted to do it in-house. They have a, a captive supplier that builds that, but they needed those precision gearings. They came to us for that, that product set. At the same time, we've had some new, call it, startup companies like REE, for example, came to us to build their drive units on their, platform chassis. So we're experiencing both elements of this, and that's why we think when we face off to the market from both a drive unit perspective as well as a component perspective, this really gives us a nice, broad served market for the product we supply today. So we have experienced both and are capable to support both. I wanted to kind of expand on the eDrive for a minute. There's a three-in-one and a two-in-one, and could you give me a little color on the differences of both of those? Yeah. A two-in-one application would simply be your gearbox and a motor, and you have an inverter somewhere else in the vehicle, sending power direction into that unit. If you have a three-in-one system, you have the inverter, essentially, a part of the eDrive unit. A part of the That would be the third unit. Yes. Inverter, motor, and gearbox. Yeah, combining those. Is there an improvement in margin to combine those, or is it more efficient for the manufacturer to combine them? Well, clearly, you can gain efficiency if you have a three-in-one system. Yeah. Where you are designing a system that is, in itself, controlling all three parts. There's clearly margin opportunity inside of that, but it also depends on the sourcing and arrangements for either inverters and motors, and each OEM has a little different, I would say, sourcing approach or desire to have certain control or not control over some of those elements in the vehicle. I guess my last question before we wrap on the EV side, maybe CapEx. What type of investment is this going to require to, you know, meet the future demand of the EV business? Yeah, no, great question. We get this quite a bit, and of course, it will take capital to launch new business. We have the same dynamic on our internal combustion engine business. Our goal as a company, and if you go back, we published some materials back at our investor day earlier this year in terms of how we are focusing on capital intensity. Our goal is to maintain a capital intensity level as we transition from ICE into EV at a very similar rate. We have a nice opportunity to leverage our installed base, especially on the component side, even the components of e-Beam axles, many of which are identical to what we do on the internal combustion axles that we do today. So leveraging our existing base and then making select investments in certain gears, et cetera, as we transition and pivot into electrification. And of course, assembly systems are unique for electrification, but they're also unique for ICE. So our goal is to keep the capital intensity at a rate very similar to what we experienced here on ICE as we make that pivot, leveraging all the tools in the box to do so. That's helpful. Maybe let's touch on 3Q performance briefly. So free cash flow, you're very, very strong, given the circumstances, and I think you're guiding to between $200 million and $250 million of free cash flow. Correct. The balance sheet's come a long way. I mean, you paid out $1.4 billion. I wasn't keeping track of that from that time, but I thought it was in that arena. So give us a little thought on, you know, what are you gonna do with the future cash flow? Where do you want, Let's start with that. The cash flow, what are you gonna do with the cash flow? Yeah, certainly in the near term, our cash flow from operations, we'll continue to invest in our R&D. We'll continue and invest in the CapEx requirements of the company. And then our free cash flow after that, which is the number that you mentioned a moment ago, we'll focus—in the near term, we'll continue to focus on reducing our outstanding indebtedness, and we've been paying that gross debt down. As I mentioned, we paid already $50 million in the first half of this year. We'll continue to focus on debt paydown from that perspective. We have taken some small, I would say, M&A activities over the last year or so, some investments in some joint ventures. We had the acquisition of Tekfor last year. That's sort of a small bolt-on acquisition- Right that presented itself. If opportunities such as that present themselves, you know, we would certainly take a look at those. But the first primary objective right now of our cash flow is to continue to pay our outstanding debt. Maybe future leverage targets, where do you feel comfortable running the company? Yeah, if you look at the industry average, is probably around 2x, a little less than 2x. We're obviously a little over 3x at the moment. Our goal would be to drift down towards the 2x lever in the near to midterm. That would be driven by two things: one, continuing to reduce, generate cash flow and reduce our debt, but also grow our EBITDA over the next couple of years as well. That will bring that ratio right back into industry average. That's our near to midterm goal at this point in time. When you're actually taking notional debt out, is there, like, a sweet spot where you're looking to be taking your debt down? As investors, we try to kind of think about where in the cap structure would be the best target for that. If you share that with us. You mean which debt instruments do we take out? Is that your- Yeah -your question? Yeah. Shannon, you want to take that one? Yeah. We have quite a bit of flexibility when we are ready to make a debt payment to decide how we want to allocate that capital. We think about various factors. We look at the maturity table, and we, as Chris showed you earlier, we really stay focused on clearing out the next forward years of maturity. We do that, right. So we focus a lot on the maturity table. We look, of course, at the interest cost, any premiums that are charged, and things like that. So we try to look at it in balance, and we make those decisions, each quarter as we make those payments. That's helpful. Thank you. Maybe a little bit on margin. So things are stabilizing, they're getting better. OEMs are done with the strike, and they're getting their production schedules a little more smooth. So 2024 is gonna maybe, you know, if I go so far as saying a little bit easier year to operate in. So how, how are you thinking maybe some cost saves along, you know, within that, and the stability and production schedules, and what that really means to your business? Yeah. Well, I, I certainly like your optimism that it'll be nice and smooth in 2024. That sounds, that sounds great, by the way. But if you think about the environment that we've operated in over the past, call it 12-24 months, with a lot of volatility from our customers on a production schedule standpoint, that allows us, does not allow us to be optimal in how we're producing. It's suboptimal from our efficiency. We're focused on moving schedules around versus focused on core productivity. And of course, the UAW stoppage in the last part of the third and fourth quarter continued to cause us a, a lot of turmoil inside our factories, as well as throughout the industry. If you transition to a more steady production state or a steady production cadence, you know, first and foremost, just your normal operations will become much more efficient. You have better planning capabilities, better scheduling capabilities. You allow you to maximize your working capital opportunities and inventory. So just by that step alone, should create margin opportunity for us and cash flow opportunity for us. But then the next leg of that, it now allows you to re-pivot back on focus on productivity inside of your factories. So you're not worried about chasing schedules. You got a nice, smooth operating pattern, and now you're doubling down on productivity, whether you're looking at things such as automating lines, whether you're looking at just kind of core blocking and tackling productivity, which will get yet another margin opportunity for the company. But you need some stability to do that. Right. Maybe talk a little bit about inflation in the market. You've got some great pass-through contracts on steel. You've done very, you know, good with that for many years. I think maybe 85%-90% of the steel is passed through. I think the labor increases in wage and the tightness in the labor market has kinda caught people by surprise. And most of my career, I never focused that much on wage increases for labor relative to what I had to do this year. So maybe talk to us a little bit about your labor force, you know, how you think the wage picture could flow through from the OEMs. I know you've got a different calibration, but maybe just give us some color around that. Yeah. I think we should start with, first of all, you made some comments related to our metal pass-through arrangements, and that is true. For metal-based indices that we pay to our supply base, we have generally back-to-back arrangements with our customers to pass on about 80%-90% of cost increases or decreases. That flows through, you know, a spot buy for aluminum, nickel, moly, scrap steel, hot roll, things of that nature. That's on the industry-related. The other element of our material buy is also the negotiated price with our supply base. Right. They are facing some of the same challenges that we face as the OEMs face. They have labor inflation, freight cost increases. There is still upward pressure to us from a, a cost increase in our base price that we buy from our suppliers. If you look last year, meaning 2022, our net inflation after recoveries was about $60 million or a full percentage point of margin. This year, we're about half of that year to date, so continue to have inflation pressure from our supply base. In addition to now pivoting towards some of the labor inflation, that we have faced, as we've been adjusting some of our compensation to our hourly workforce, in particular, to retain and attract personnel. Now you add in a new dynamic of these contracts that were recently ratified in the United States, at the Big Three. Our customers, at some point, are gonna start to now probably work their way around through the economy over the next year or two, as different contracts come up for negotiation. So- Right, as people point to those and- Exactly. You know, inflation's a very, very real issue for us. You know, we're actively negotiating with our customers on this topic. Like, as I mentioned, we have some work to do to close this out, but we're experiencing this from our supply base and also from the labor standpoint. As it relates to labor, inside the U.S., we have about 4,000 hourly workers, about half are unionized. We have no union contracts in the U.S. up until 2025. The larger ones are in 2026. But obviously, the dynamics of the current marketplace, we're gonna have to keep a very close eye on. But it's a real issue we're gonna have to manage, and quite frankly, the entire supply chain inside the auto space is gonna have to manage. Maybe we'll just end it with one, like, kind of global question. I know we're kind of myopically focused here in North America, but are there opportunities outside of North America that are worth talking about? In terms of growing our revenues? Yeah. Absolutely. And if you think of some of the... Look at the four business wins we announced here in the last quarter, they were both, or all in China and in India. So we continue to see high interest in our product in that segment. We've made the acquisition of Tekfor in Europe last year, so that has almost doubled our European presence. We see a lot of opportunities to support some of the electrification trends in Europe, but also grow with some of the existing customer bases that we brought online, new to AAM or have grown inside AAM with the acquisition of Tekfor. So we see growth opportunities both in Europe and in Asia. That's great. Well, Chris and Shannon, thank you so much for, again, spending time with us at the conference. Good luck with the rest of your one-on-ones during the day. To the audience, thank you very much for spending time with us. Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone. Fire. See See you.