Company: APTV
Filing Date: 2025-10-30
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001521332-25-000051
Chunk: 86

Company: Aptiv PLC
Filing Date: 2025-10-30
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 1
Chunk 86
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4, we invested approximately $1.6 billion (which includes approximately $535 million co-investment by customers and government agencies) in research and development, including engineering, to maintain our portfolio of innovative products, and own/hold approximately 11,000 patents and protective rights. We also encourage “open innovation” and collaborate extensively with peers in the industry, government agencies and academic institutions. Our technology competencies are recognized by both customers and government agencies, which, as noted above, co-invest in new product development, accelerating the pace of innovation and reducing the risk associated with successful commercialization of technological breakthroughs.

In the past, suppliers often incurred the initial cost of engineering, designing and developing automotive component parts, and recovered their investments over time by including a cost recovery component in the price of each part based on expected volumes. Recently, we and many other suppliers have negotiated for cost recovery payments independent of volumes. This trend reduces our economic risk.

Pricing. Cost-cutting initiatives adopted by our customers result in increased downward pressure on pricing. Our customer supply agreements generally require step-downs in component pricing over the periods of production and OEMs have historically possessed significant leverage over their outside suppliers because the automotive component supply industry is fragmented and serves a limited number of automotive OEMs. Our profitability depends in part on our ability to generate sufficient production cost savings in the future to offset price reductions. In addition, during recent years, global economies and our industry were subjected to significant inflationary cost pressures, and we continue to face additional potential impacts from the rapidly evolving trade policies and tariff actions. We continue to work with our customers, both through price recoveries and adjustments as well as future pricing adjustments as contracts renew, to mitigate the impact of these inflationary pressures on our results of operations.

We are focused on maintaining a low fixed cost structure that provides us flexibility to remain profitable at all points of the traditional vehicle industry production cycle. As a result, approximately 97% of our hourly workforce is located in best cost countries. Furthermore, we have substantial operational flexibility by leveraging a large workforce of contingent workers, which represented approximately 31% of the hourly workforce as of September 30, 2025. However, we will continue to adjust our cost structure and optimize our manufacturing footprint in response to changes in the global and regional automotive markets and in order to increase investment in advanced technologies and engineering, as evidenced by our ongoing restructuring programs focused on reducing our global overhead costs and on the continued rotation of our manufacturing footprint to best cost locations in Europe and aligning