Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Owens & Minor's Third Quarter 2016 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Kevin, and I'll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question-and-answer session towards the end of the conference call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Ms. Trudi Allcott. You may proceed. Truitt Allcott - Owens & Minor, Inc.: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Owens & Minor's third quarter 2016 earnings call. I'm Trudi Allcott, and on behalf of the team, I would like to read a Safe Harbor statement before we begin. Our comments today will be focused on financial results for the third quarter 2016, which are included in our press release. In our discussion today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information about these measures and reconciliations to GAAP financial measures are also included in our press release and in the supplemental information posted on our website. In the course of our discussion today, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please see our press release and our SEC filings for a full discussion of these risk factors. Participating on our call this morning are: Cody Phipps, our President and CEO, who will provide an overview of the business and the progress we're making on our transformation initiatives; Randy Meier, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and President of International, who will give an update on our results and insight into the performance of our three segments. And Nick Pace, our General Counsel, is also on the call today. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Cody Phipps, our President and CEO, who will start things off this morning. Cody? Paul Cody Phipps - Owens & Minor, Inc.: Thank you, Trudi, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the call today. As you saw in our earnings announcement yesterday, we achieved solid earnings per share for the quarter and the year-to-date period. We made progress on a number of fronts across the enterprise. We successfully managed the exit of the large customer that we mentioned earlier in the year. Due to the size of this customer, we knew that this will be a challenging transition for our business. Our teams have done a good job working through this transition. We will continue to take steps to adjust our cost structure. During the quarter, the International segment had another profitable quarter, helping us to shift our focus to growing revenues and engaging in strategic discussions with a number of important new customers. On the leadership front, we onboarded our new Chief Information Officer, Steve Olive. He joins us from Philips, a $33 billion global company where he most recently served as their Global CIO in Amsterdam leading an IT organization across 100 countries. Steve is a strategic thinker who has solid experience in business transformations, both in the U.S. and abroad. Steve is already in process with his energy and vision for the future and he and his team will play an increasingly important role in our go-forward strategy. Finally, during the quarter, our teams made continued progress in managing costs and improving productivity, staying focused on delivering our plan and helping us to strengthen our foundation for the future. Now I would like to spend a few moments our new enterprise strategy. Our provider customers continue to experience significant cost pressures driven by new reimbursement guidelines, which are increasingly linked to patient outcomes. This evolving healthcare model is also changing the competitive dynamics in our industry. While the progress we've made in managing costs and improving efficiency is helping to drive positive results, these actions alone are not enough. We will have to take bolder steps to reposition Owens & Minor for the future. To address this changing market, we've been developing future strategies for long-term success and we are near the end of that planning process. Our management team and board have aligned on our new strategy, and we are starting to take action in some areas while we continue to refine our detailed execution plans. We will spend more time on our new strategy at our Investor Day in February, but I would like to introduce the components at a high level today. Building on our legacy as a leading logistics player, we're evolving into a global healthcare services company. In this role, we will: connect the world of medical products to the point of care; attack complexity and unlock efficiency at every step of the healthcare value chain; and become the indispensable partner for both manufacturers and providers delivering exceptional value. To accomplish this, our new strategy has three key elements: one, strengthen our core logistics platform; two, unlock new growth platforms; and three, transform to accelerate our move into services. As for strengthening our core, our industry is at a crossroads with unprecedented cost pressures and rising complexity. The healthcare industry is behind almost every other industry in driving continuous improvement and productivity. Our industry has to become more efficient and productive and we are in a strong position to lead this charge and to attack system-wide complexity for both providers and manufacturers. To accomplish this, we will invest in our core business, from driving Lean practices into our operations to creating greater standardization, to improving our data connectivity and supplier services. Our goal is to build the most efficient and intelligent route to market from the point of manufacture, all the way to the point of care. As for growth, we have exciting prospects ahead. I'll highlight three of these areas. First, our newest segment, CPS has great potential for the future. Our customers want us in this business and they value our procedure-based solutions that create efficiencies while enhancing patient safety. They also want our help in creating transparency and unlocking efficiencies in their networks, operating rooms, and expanding sites of care. A second area of growth for us is with our manufacturing customers, both domestic and abroad. Our customers want us to bring new approaches and technologies to existing problems, scale and outsourcing for their non-core activities, and enhance data and connectivity to help them navigate the increasingly complex quality and regulatory environment. Our International customers also want a simplified pan-European approach for their operations. Domestically, Owens & Minor has always been the trusted partner to branded manufacturing, providing them with exceptional value. We can build on this position, bringing new capabilities and outsourcing services to unlock value. A third area for greater growth involves expanding our reach and services along the full continuum of care, as our IDN customers advance into more and more settings outside of the hospital. Finally, our strategy is also about transformation. No company these days can succeed by standing still. Indeed, across our 134 years in healthcare, we have a history of reinventing ourselves. Today we sit squarely in the middle of the flow of goods, funds and information. We believe a critical component of our value is embedded in the tremendous amount of data and information that we maintain, analyze and deliver every day to providers, manufacturers, and GPOs, and we believe there's more we can do in this area to create value for our stakeholders. Clearly, all aspects of our strategy are centered on the creation of significant and sustained value for our healthcare customers. We remain focused on achieving our goals for 2016 while we lay the groundwork for the future. Thank you. Now, Randy will review our financial results and provide an overview of our International operations. Randy? Richard A. Meier - Owens & Minor, Inc.: Thank you, Cody, and good morning, everyone. Today I will review our consolidated results and provide an update on our segments. The adjustments we've made to reported results and the reconciliations to GAAP are outlined in our press release. Before I review our results, I'm sure you saw our board has authorized another $100 million in share repurchases over the next three years. At the same time, the board also approved a fourth quarter dividend payment of $0.255 per share. Both of these actions are aimed at returning value to our shareholders. Turning to the quarter, we successfully completed the transition of a large customer, primarily from our West Coast facilities. The transition, which started in August and was completed prior to the end of the quarter, affected quarterly revenue by about $60 million. Even without the benefit of the full quarter contributions from this customer, we are pleased that we achieved quarterly GAAP earnings per share of $0.48 for the quarter and adjusted EPS of $0.51, in line with expectation. Year-to-date GAAP results were $1.32 and adjusted year-to-date earnings were $1.53. Consolidated revenues for the quarter declined 2.3% to $2.42 billion when compared to last year. On a year-to-date basis, consolidated revenues improved 1% to $7.36 billion. Compared to last year, revenue improvements on the year-to-date results was from solid performance in our Domestic segment and from one extra selling day in the first quarter. Consolidated operating earnings were $53.6 million for the quarter, essentially unchanged compared to last year. On an adjusted basis, operating earnings for the quarter declined $3.4 million to $56.3 million. For the year-to-date period, GAAP operating earnings were $151 million while adjusted operating earnings were $171 million, representing increases in $8.2 million and $6.4 million, respectively, when compared to 2015. For the year-to-date period, the effective tax rate was 37.3% compared to 41.6% in the same period last year. On an adjusted basis, the effective tax rate was 36.7% compared to 37.3% last year. Asset management metrics included DSO of 21.1 days and inventory turns of 8.9 times. Operating cash flow for the first nine months was $144 million compared to $206 million last year. The primary cause of the decrease was timing changes in working capital in the prior year and our customer transition this year. Turning to a discussion of our three segments, Domestic segment revenues for the quarter decreased 1.5% to $2.29 billion, largely as a result of the customer exit during the quarter. For the year-to-date period, revenues improved 1.5% to $6.95 billion, with growth coming primarily from large provider customers as well as contributions from an extra selling day in the first quarter. For the quarter, Domestic segment operating earnings were $41 million, declined 2.3% when compared to last year. For the first nine months of the year, Domestic segment operating earnings improved 6.5% to $126 million. Quarterly results reflected the customer exit and lower income from product price changes when compared to last year. These declines were partially offset by reduced operating expenses. Improvement in the year-to-date results came in the first half revenue growth and expense control initiatives. As for the International segment, quarterly International segment revenues decreased $9 million or 9.7% to $84 million. For the year-to-date period, International segment revenues declined $25 million or 9% to $256 million. Excluding the negative impact of foreign currency, quarterly revenues declined $1.4 million, while year-to-date revenues declined $12.4 million. This decline is primarily due to the exit of a UK customer last year. Looking ahead, we know our pipeline of new business is robust and there is growing interest in our pan-European services. The International segment had operating earnings of $1.4 million for the third quarter, decreased slightly when compared to the prior year. For the first nine months, operating earnings improved nearly $1 million to $3.4 million, driven by improvement in cost controls and operating efficiency. The International team and done a great job in turning around their operations and achieving and maintaining profitability. As for the CPS segment, revenues for the third quarter were $133 million, a decline of 7.8% when compared to last year. For the year-to-date period, revenues were $409 million, unchanged from the prior year. Operating earnings for CPS were $14.3 million for the quarter and $41.9 million year-to-date. Both periods experienced a decline in operating earnings of about $2 million, largely resulting from the third quarter revenue shortfall. During the quarter, we experienced greater than expected demand for our kitting services and solutions, which in turn created production challenges in capacity and workforce availability. Our teams are systematically working through these challenges in order to meet the needs of our customers as quickly as possible. We are excited about the potential for this new business and we are taking positive steps toward the future, and we're making the right investments to scale the business. As Cody mentioned, we executed the transition of a large customer during the quarter. We are making adjustments to our cost structure and platform and we remain focused on delivering our 2016 goals. However, with increasing provider cost pressures and the resulting competitive dynamics in our industry, we believe that we will continue to experience gross margin pressure in the fourth quarter and we expect this trend to continue into next year. That said, based on our year-to-date results and our expectations for the fourth quarter, we are affirming our 2016 financial outlook of adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.00 to $2.05. We will discuss the changes in our market and our new strategic plan more fully at our Investor Day in February. At the meeting, our intention is to provide a longer-range financial outlook associated with our new enterprise strategy. Thank you. And, with that, we'll turn the call over to the operator for questions. Operator?