Electronics supplier Visteon Corp. reported record new business in 2017 and a dip in sales in the fourth quarter prompted by discontinued operations and customer pricing.
For the quarter, adjusted earnings, minus interest, taxes and one-time costs, increased 6.3 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $102 million. Net income, including all one-time costs, improved to $25 million from $2 million.
Fourth-quarter revenue slipped 2.3 percent to $797 million from the same period in 2016.
"We accomplished our key strategic priorities for 2017, including strengthening the core business, achieving double-digit sales growth in China and developing the DriveCore Level 3-plus autonomous driving platform," CEO Sachin Lawande said in a statement. "By winning a record $7 billion in new business, we made excellent progress toward our 2017-18 target of $12 billion in new business. Our 2017 performance keeps us on track to meet our long-term growth targets."
Sales in Asia accounted for 43 percent of the company's business, while Europe made up 31 percent and North America was 23 percent.
In 2017, Visteon experienced significant interest from automakers in 10- and 12-inch digital clusters with 2-D and 3-D rendering capabilities, Lawande said on a conference call with investors and reporters.
"The displays are continuing to improve both in terms of size and resolution as well as other graphics capabilities," he said. "We're starting to see demand for integration of camera-based driver monitoring features in these clusters."
Digital clusters make up about a $7 billion global market, said Lawande, and the supplier's market share in the segment stood at 18 percent in 2017.
Audio infotainment earned $1.5 billion in new business compared with $700 million in 2016.
"We won two Phoenix infotainment programs with the second win being a software-only sale to upgrade an existing infotainment system for a vehicle manufacturer in Europe," said Lawande. "We also achieved two Smart Core domain controller wins for integrated cluster and infotainment with vehicle manufacturers in Asia."
For the full year, sales were $3.14 billion, down 0.5 percent from the previous year.
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