Paul Jacobson
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at General Motors
Thank you, Mary, and I appreciate you all joining us this morning.
We're off to a good start to the year, and I'd like to thank our team for all their hard work in helping deliver another strong set of financial results. We experienced consistent pricing trends during the quarter, below the 2% to 2.5% headwind we built into our full-year guidance. For Q1, pricing was down only about $200 million year-over-year, driven by demand for our products and a disciplined go-to market strategy that prioritizes profitability and margins. And so far in April, we've seen pricing remain relatively consistent. That said, our comparisons get tougher as we lap price increases taken in Q2 of last year.
The US retail industry experienced a slight mix shift away from the full-size truck segment during the quarter. However, we increased our volume and share with lower incentives than our competitors, which speaks to our strong truck franchises and our customer loyalty. Retail sales were up 6% while fleet sales decreased more than 20%, driven by two main factors.
First, we encountered some production constraints impacting the timing of fleet deliveries on our commercial van and midsize pickups. We expect to recover most of this volume in the second half of the year. Second, we made the strategic decision to produce more retail full-size SUVs compared to last year to satisfy our strong customer demand. Retail sales on our full-size SUVs have a higher trim mix that earned us more revenue per vehicle. We are committed to growing our strong and profitable fleet business, but we'll continue to balance fleet and retail customer demand with a focus on profitability.
We generated healthy cash flow during the quarter, helping support $600 million of year-to-date open market stock repurchases, incremental to the ongoing ASR, retiring another 14 million shares since the beginning of the year. We now have approximately $800 million remaining in our existing share repurchase authorization. In addition, we completed the first tranche of the $10 billion ASR last fall, retiring 4 million shares in Q1.
Our fully diluted share count at the end of the quarter was 1.16 billion, down 17% from where we were just one year ago. Given the strong momentum we've seen thus far and our confidence in the 2024 outlook, we are raising full-year guidance to EBIT adjusted in the $12.5 billion to $14.5 billion range, EPS diluted adjusted to the $9 to $10 range, and adjusted automotive free cash flow in the $8.5 billion to $10.5 billion range.
Now, let's get into the Q1 results. We grew total company revenue by 8% to $43 billion, driven by higher wholesale volumes in North America. Over the last 24 months, we've achieved consistent revenue growth resulting in a CAGR of more than 15% over that period. We also achieved $3.9 billion in EBIT adjusted, 9.0% EBIT adjusted margins, and $2.62 in EPS diluted adjusted. EBIT adjusted was up year-over-year and well above consensus driven by our continued strong ICE performance, improving EV profitability, and our strategic cost actions, mitigating the effect of higher labor costs. We achieved adjusted automotive free cash flow of $1.1 billion, up materially versus being flat in Q1 of 2023, driven by improved working capital benefits through inventory management and production timing.
North America delivered Q1 EBIT adjusted margins of 10.6%, driving $3.8 billion of EBIT adjusted, up $300 million year-over-year, primarily from higher wholesale volumes combined with steady pricing and ongoing cost containment. During the quarter, we continued to benefit from our fixed cost reduction program, realizing an incremental $300 million from lower marketing and engineering spend. Our fixed cost base is at its lowest since Q1 2022 and we are on track to achieve the full $2 billion net of depreciation and amortization by the end of 2024.
Dealer inventory levels ended the quarter slightly above our 50-day to 60-day end of year target at 63 days. However, we believe we are well-positioned from an inventory standpoint as we head into a seasonally stronger part of the year and incur a few weeks of planned downtime in Q2 on our full-size pickups to prepare for future launches and to install new equipment.
GM International Q1 EBIT adjusted was breakeven, down $350 million year-over-year. China equity income was a loss of $100 million, down $200 million year-over-year as we lowered production to balance dealer inventory levels. This was slightly better than expected due to a continued focus on cost efficiencies. Having made progress reducing inventory levels, production is normalizing and we expect to return to profitability in Q2.
EBIT adjusted in GM International, excluding China equity income, was $100 million, down $150 million year-over-year, driven by lower volume in South America and strategic decisions to protect margins. We anticipate new product launches and further cost efficiencies will help drive profitability improvements beginning in Q2.
GM Financial continues to perform well with Q1 EBT adjusted of $700 million, in line with last year and tracking well within the full year $2.5 billion to $3.0 billion guidance range. They continue to drive portfolio growth and paid a $450 million dividend to GM during the quarter. Cruise expenses were $400 million in the quarter, down from $800 million in Q4 '23, reflecting our cost-reduction activities and a more focused operational plan. As Mary mentioned, Cruise is resuming operations in Phoenix, along with testing in simulated environments and on closed courses while they work to earn trust and build partnerships with regulators and customers. We expect full-year Cruise expenses to be around $1.7 billion.
Let's move now to one of the most important metrics we're focused on, EV profitability. We continue to see sequential and year-over-year improvements in variable profit and EBIT margins as we benefit from scale, material cost, and mix improvements. Since last year, we have significantly reduced cell costs with a large driver being lower battery raw material costs, especially for lithium. We ramped our first battery JV plant last year, and as they increase production and made other efficiencies, the cost of cells came down significantly. And Cell plant number 2 in Tennessee is ramping even faster based on the learnings from plant 1 and is expected to reach full installed capacity by the end of the year.
Collectively, these factors are helping improve vehicle profitability. For example, we have seen more than $12,000 of year-over-year cost-savings in the LYRIQ alone. As we continue to ramp, we expect to see the benefits from the production tax credit continue to grow and our fixed cost absorption to improve meaningfully. We wholesaled 22,000 Ultium-based EVs in Q1, up from less than 2,000 in the first quarter of last year and remain on track to achieve our 200,000 to 300,000 unit production and wholesale volume target for 2024. We will share more on EV profitability as we progress through the year.
I would also like to touch on EV pricing, which we recently adjusted on the 2024 Blazer EV. This action has been well-received by our dealers and customers, and as Mary mentioned, the vehicle is gaining momentum. We assume some pricing pressure for both ICE and EVs in our business plan and guidance for 2024, but we continue to work on finding additional offsets through cost performance and other efficiencies. Importantly, this pricing action doesn't change our expectation to achieve positive variable profit for our EV portfolio in the second half of the year or our mid-single-digit margin target in 2025.
We remain confident that when consumers see our new EVs and get a chance to drive them, they will appreciate the unique combination of design, performance, range, and value that we offer at multiple price points. And because of our supply chain efforts, customers are well-positioned to leverage the $7,500 clean energy consumer purchase tax credit.
In closing, I want to reiterate our capital allocation framework, along with our intention to be much more consistent in how we deploy capital. We are generating strong cash flow, which is funding our EV transformation and growth opportunities. These efforts include investing in future products, transitioning manufacturing capacity to EVs, and deploying resources into cutting-edge battery technology. At the same time, you've seen us adapt to the dynamic market, particularly for EVs and made bold decisions to be more efficient with our capital spend, something we will continue to do moving forward.
Our balance sheet remains strong and on shareholder returns, we executed the ASR last November and the response has been overwhelmingly positive with GM stock outperforming its peers and being up nearly 50% since the announcement. We have seen about a one turn improvement in our P/E multiple since the ASR, but we are still significantly undervalued relative to our historical average as well as our competitors and other industrial companies. Obviously, we're not satisfied and know that we have a lot of work to do on our valuation and remain committed to improving it.
As we move forward, we believe the strong cash generated by our ICE portfolio, along with improved execution on our EV strategy, as well as tangible progress on Cruise, will help generate significant returns for all GM stakeholders.
This concludes our opening comments, and we'll now move to the Q&A portion of the call.
