Call participants
Chief Executive Officer — Jerome Dorlack
Chief Financial Officer — Mark Oswald
Investor Relations — Linda Conrad
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Full Conference Call Transcript
Jerome Dorlack: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review our first quarter results. Today, we will focus on the quarter’s solid performance and provide an update to our fiscal year 2026 outlook. We will also discuss new business awards and launches as well as share some insights on our expectations for the future beyond fiscal year 2026. Before we get into the results, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our more than 65,000 employees who work diligently every day to deliver on our commitments, especially in light of the significant challenges during the past quarter.
The management team and I appreciate the team’s collective efforts, which resulted in a solid start to fiscal year 2026. I would also like to thank our customers around the world who continue to recognize Adient plc as the world’s preeminent CDN supplier. Thank you. Turning to slide four, which summarizes our first quarter results. The beginning of the year was filled with uncertainty. The Novella’s fire, the Nexperia shortage, and JLR productions were all unknowns. But as the Adient plc team does time and time again, we managed through each of these events by leveraging a resilient operating model.
Thankfully, the uncertainty of these events is nearly behind us, and we are focused on execution to meet the needs of our customers. For the most part, volumes are expected to recover within our fiscal year, and we expect to mitigate much of the overall impact of these events. Our revenue for the quarter was up 4% year over year, primarily driven by FX tailwinds from Europe. Excluding FX, revenue in China was up significantly as expected, delivering on our growth commitments and more than offsetting production headwinds from North America. We remain laser-focused on new business wins and ensuring we remain our customer’s supplier of choice.
We are supporting our customers’ onshoring efforts in North America, both direct and indirect, and continue to view Adient plc as a net beneficiary of onshoring. While we have no new programs to announce at this time, we remain highly optimistic about the near-term potential for a large domestic OEM program. Our free cash flow generation and balance sheet remain strong, which allowed us to allocate capital in a disciplined manner. We returned an additional $25 million to shareholders through share repurchases this quarter, which Mark will detail further in his section. And we ended the quarter with $855 million in cash.