Conference Call with Schaeffler India Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 and Full Year Earnings Performance. Listen in to the full earnings transcript.

Call Participants: Mr Harsha Kadam - CEO, Mr Satish Patel - Director Finance & CFO, Vijay Chaudhury - Corporate Communications and Investor Relations

Introductory remarks from Harsha Kadam

Good morning ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to this investor call. As you all know, we were already living in a world of unpredictability, a complex world, an ambiguous world.

And as if that was not enough, we entered into an altogether new phase called the Covid-19. With this unprecedented challenge and the enormity we are on, we need to act now to protect and run our business today and also plan and retool our business for the future. So, in this period of the officially declared lockdown, we brought into our note, where we have to respond to the crisis and protect our business first to ensure the business continuity and accelerate through the recovery cost. 

As I said earlier responding to the crisis, the first thing was to take care of our employees and protect our employees. I would like to take you through a brief presentation wherein I will cover first what Schaeffler did during this Covid crisis and how we have managed this crisis and how we continue to manage this crisis. I would also like to touch upon the economy and markets. Next, I would like to take you through the first quarter 2020 performance and a little information on our operations considering the lockdown situation.

Like every organization has done, we have shut down, we have got into crisis management note and a crisis management team at Schaeffler as early as from the 5th of March itself. The thing that activated us and we got into a total evaluation assessment and we are putting in very strong protocols to measure where we are today in the crisis and what needs to be done to manage the crisis. 

We started to implement all the hygiene practices, and started to use protective equipment immediately from the 5th of March itself. Also, we began to share a lot of information with all colleagues and employees to bring about the awareness of the magnitude of the unprecedented challenge that has been unfolded to us.

To share with you, we moved to work from home from 17th of March and I would like to let you know that we were very proactive in taking the measures even before the government declared a lockdown and moved into the crisis management note. So, we proactively took action, all necessary steps to ensure that our employees are safe which is paramount for us. Certainly, we got to look into how our customers' operations run well so we took care of customers planning and we looked at the tough situation. 

In the process of moving to work from home situation, we also resorted to making sure that all the necessary infrastructure by way of communications, by way of connectivity was established with each and every staff and also with the use of social media, we were able to ensure that we stay connected with the last man in the organisation.

In all these, we also took care that we improve our communication and engagement levels with our employees because we believe to keep the morale and motivation level of our employees high, we have to increase the level of communication by the leadership teams. Also, in addition to this, we also did our bit in terms of community care and towards the Covid cause. We shuffled with a lot of needy organisations that take forward the thinking ahead, who have gone ahead and helped in this crisis to help manage this crisis. 

Some of the safety measures and protocols that we have put in place is very comprehensive in line with Schaeffler’s production system to ensure that we have been exercising full safety measures including audits and the tests being conducted in the area of hazardous materials. And not to mention that strict implementation of social distancing, not to mention hygiene management practices as well as personal protective equipment like face masks have been mandatory and gloves to be used wherever it is required. We had a comprehensive media mechanism here, a thorough check and we are complying with all the requirements that the authorities have asked us to maintain in this crisis. 

 I am on Slide 6 of the presentation wherein you see that there is a gradual slowdown on the GDP trend in the country and the number that we have shown here for Q4 of 2019, we were at around 4.5 - 4.7% GDP. It has surely been a challenging first quarter, and the second quarter appears to be much more challenging than the first quarter.