Introduction

Riding the waves of new industrialization and the transformation toward automotive electrification, Highly Marelli is driving an upgrade of its financial system — shifting from traditional accounting finance to value-creating management accounting. Recently, Highly Marelli held its Global Finance Conference in Shanghai, bringing together a global consensus on business-finance integration and strengthening the foundation for its global R&D and production footprint through a refined, digitalized, and globally oriented management and control system.

As a global core supplier of automotive thermal management solutions, Highly Marelli has precisely seized the opportunities presented by the new energy vehicle industry, continuously optimizing and refining its global industrial footprint. From 2021 to 2026, the Company has leveraged a full-chain, refined operational management and control system to steadily strengthen its business foundation, consistently improve operational quality, and enhance overall operational efficiency. Among these efforts, the digital upgrading and strategic transformation of the financial system have provided solid core support for the Company's stable operations and high-quality development.

Highly Marelli has established a two-tier financial architecture comprising a "Global Professional Competency Center + Regional Business Partners," breaking down barriers between business and finance. The headquarters coordinates unified global standards for accounting, treasury, taxation, and digitalization, while regional finance teams are embedded in business frontline operations, bringing profit forecasting and cost control upfront into project, production, and investment decision-making. Lu Haifeng, CEO of Highly Marelli, emphasized that finance must go beyond its traditional bookkeeping function and become a collaborative navigator for business decision-making, leveraging comprehensive data to support medium- and long-term strategies such as capacity expansion and R&D investment. CFO Liu Jun stated that by tapping into the value of data through a standardized financial system, the Company can precisely identify profit growth drivers and hedge against operational risks arising from global market fluctuations.

To drive sustainable growth, Highly Marelli has implemented multiple refined management and control measures: unifying global project profit forecasting templates, dynamically adjusting profit targets in response to market changes; aligning the 2027 budget closely with medium- and long-term planning, prioritizing resource allocation for core new energy businesses; optimizing the SAP system to integrate production, sales, and financial data streams; and upgrading cross-border treasury and transfer pricing compliance management to strengthen the global operational risk control framework.

The conference deepened business-finance integration through both internal and external empowerment: internal experts deconstructed key indicators for lean production, while external professional institutions shared insights on AI-driven financial automation and exchange rate hedging solutions. Participants conducted on-site visits to R&D centers and smart factories to gain a first-hand understanding of frontline operations. Three specialized workshops focused on project profitability, capital expenditure, and factory cost management, producing actionable implementation plans and phased task lists. Sugiura Hiroshi, Head of the Finance Headquarters, stated that the conference had unified the consensus on transformation, and the implementation of finance-driven development initiatives is now fully underway.

As China continues to vigorously develop new quality productive forces and the automotive industry accelerates its electrification evolution, Highly Marelli's push for management accounting transformation represents a strategic move by a manufacturing enterprise to align with industrial trends and reinforce its growth foundation. In the next phase, Highly Marelli's global finance team will continue to support operational decision-making from the front end, optimize costs, treasury, and cross-border risk control across the entire chain, and support new energy technology breakthroughs, overseas market expansion, and smart production line upgrades — securing the Company's competitive edge in the global thermal management industry and driving sustainable, high-quality global development through refined management transformation.