Tenneco Inc at Deutsche Bank Securities Leveraged Finance Conference - Final.(Broadcast transcript)

KATHRYN O'CONNOR, ANALYST, DEUTSCHE BANK: (Audio in progress) -- and I'm here to introduce Tenneco Automotive. From the Company, we have Leslie Hunziker and Ken Trammell, and I think Ken is going to kick off.

KEN TRAMMELL, EVP, CFO, TENNECO INC.: Kathryn, thank you very much for the introduction. It's an interesting time to be at a credit conference, so I appreciate Deutsche Bank hosting the conference. What a great time to talk about what's going on in the market right now. Let's talk a little bit about Tenneco, though. I will spend a few minutes and we'll leave some minutes -- some time at the end and answer some questions. That will give you lots of time to read the Safe Harbor and move right along here.

If you take a look at this slide, this just gives you a brief overview of Tenneco, and really what we look like. Emission control and ride control, you can see around 70/30, give or take, depending on which way the market is heading. On an overall basis, we're one of the few OE suppliers that maintains an active aftermarket. Our OE business grows a lot faster than our aftermarket does, though, so you can see that diluting down over time as especially the emission control component of our OE business grows with regulation. We will talk some about that as we walk through the presentation.

On the lower left-hand corner, you can see our balance from a sales perspective, a very good geographic balance. You can see, especially on a year-to-date basis, and that was through June of 2008, really the European, South American, and the Asia-Pacific regions that we do business in and that have been doing fairly well through the end of June, helping balance out some of the challenges that we have been facing in North America.

We did say at the end of our second-quarter call that we're certainly concerned about Europe, and we started to see some of the things that we talk about from an economic perspective in Europe, including a little bit of pressure on some of the schedules there. And the same of that in China. We talked about some challenges in China. So obviously -- but that geographic balance works really well for Tenneco. Being in as many regions as we are certainly helps us deal with the situations that we see right now.

And you can see then on the EBIT side, obviously, also the fact that the North American challenges have certainly been big for us, but what has been happening in our regions in the rest of the world help in balance that out so far on a year-to-date basis.

Taking a quick look at our market positions, we've got very good market positions. We are really number one or number two practically everywhere we do business. We have been gaining market share in a number of these regions and so feel very good about the position that Tenneco is in. In taking a look at our customer mix, there is some new information since we presented last at the Deutsche Bank conference on this slide and we wanted to make sure that we highlighted for people not only our exposure to the global manufacturers -- and you can see a very good mix of global manufacturers on this slide -- but also I wanted to give you a feel for what balance of that comes from the North American portion of those manufacturers.

You can see, certainly GM with a very high exposure in North America, but still a good exposure outside of the US. Ford, a very balanced exposure, both in the US and outside of the US. Very proud about some of the guys on this slide, including Shanghai Automotive. You can see very good exposure to Toyota on a global basis, again mostly weighted right now in the US but growing globally. In fact, earlier this year, we announced that we'd won about $200 million of new business with our Japanese OE customers and that a quarter of that, about 25% of it, would launch actually in the BRIC regions, Brazil, Russia, India, and China. So very good exposure with the Japanese OEs. And I'm very happy to have Shanghai Automotive among our top customers as well because they have been doing very well in China.

On the aftermarket side, you can see very good mix of customers, no one is dominant, and very well represented there as you would expect from someone with really number one market shares in the aftermarket.

Taking a minute and looking at our platform mix again, there is some new information on this slide. We expanded this earlier this year to show our top 15 platforms. We've previously showed our top 10 platforms. And you can see the percentage that each one of these platforms individually makes up of our total revenues. In total, these platforms make up about 37% of our total revenues. So even though it's the top 15 platforms that we do business on, you can see at 37% of our total revenues, obviously we have quite a few platforms that we provide parts for on a global basis. In fact, up to about 220 different platforms, and that makes our average platform revenue about $18 million.

So very good representation across a number of different platforms, and although, as we've said a number of times, we do have heavy weighting towards pickup trucks and SUVs in the US, we also have a very good representation of passenger cars and a very good representation outside of the US on platforms there as well.

Taking a quick look at financial performance, given the challenges that the North American market has seen on a year-to-date basis, we certainly feel pretty good about how we've been able to manage through that. You can see that we have held adjusted SGA&E as a percent of our revenues flat. Our EBITDA is down a bit, only about 4% though, again given the challenges in North America, we're pretty proud of that. EPS down a bit, obviously, but still doing well considering what's happening in the market, and very focused on cash flow this year. You can see even though we're a fairly seasonal cash flow user, we do generally use cash flow in the first half of the year, and that comes back to us as we move through the second half of the year, especially because of the aftermarket and OE production cycles. You can see, though, that we've seen year-over-year improvement in spite of the challenges that we've had in the North American market.

So that's a little brief overview of Tenneco. I want to take a few minutes and kind of walk down this slide. If you look at the boxes on the left-hand side, if you think about the top one as the top line, that's the revenue side. I'll spend some time talking about what the drivers of Tenneco's growth opportunities are. …