Joseph M. DeVivo
Analyst · Raymond James
Thank you very much, Bob. So good afternoon, everyone. Happy new year. It will be a great year for AngioDynamics. I'd like to welcome you to our second quarter fiscal year 2013 conference call. With me is Mark Frost, our incoming Chief Financial Officer, so let's all welcome Mark. The second quarter was an encouraging quarter for AngioDynamics. Around the company, we began to see signs our new organization is starting to deliver, whether it was our new sales force starting to play some offense in beginning new account evaluations after a good 4 months of transition and relearning; or our operations teams finding more and more cost to drive out; our marketing teams getting used to the benefits of our combined product offerings; our quality teams accelerating our QMS implementation; or our finance teams beginning to drive cash performance. All in all, it was a consistent quarter of improvement. Our research and development teams brought to life some new growth opportunities, one which we will unveil at our upcoming Analyst Day in January. What's more important is we begin to see signs of what type of company we will be able to become. We generated overall 3% top line growth worldwide, to $87 million, and on guidance. We delivered an adjusted EBITDA of almost $14 million or $0.39 per share and generated $11 million in cash, resulting in an adjusted EPS of $0.10 per share ahead of expectations. Overall, our company performed well. Of course, the first half of our year has not been without challenges. We initially attributed a very slow start to our fiscal year to our organizational changes, of course, in our U.S. sales force. While that remains the main contributor, with our peer companies also are now reporting soft sales in the U.S. for the periods June through September, we realized we were not alone in seeing the softness in the U.S. market. Weakness in interventional cardiology procedure volumes were also noted for many companies. Now we were also adversely affected by Hurricane Sandy, which we estimate cost us about $500,000 to $700,000 of U.S. revenues for the second quarter. While we originally planned being a bit ahead of where we are today, all in all, our teams delivered a respectable top line, bottom line and cash performance in the first half of 2013 fiscal. Where the U.S. was weak, international continued its double-digit growth. Delivering another 20% plus performance for the 10th consecutive quarter, our channel development is increasingly contributing to our overall top line growth. I am extremely pleased and proud of our international team here at AngioDynamics. Globally, our EVLT business also delivered double-digit growth as we saw the business in Europe stabilize while it also began to reaccelerate in the U.S. after a slow first quarter. What is also notable is the progress we made with our GPO and IDN strategy. Our team is engaged with a number of hospital groups today, looking for new vendor relationships as an alternative to their incumbent. What we've noticed is our consolidated Vascular Access portfolio, as well as our Fluid Management business, makes AngioDynamics a more viable and quite frankly sizable partner. These relationships take time to develop of course and will contribute to the top line, but it will take time. That said, we are at the table more than we ever were, and I believe account conversions and corporate agreements will be a growth driver in the future. Our Oncology business also continues its quarterly double-digit growth contributions in the face of more and more challenging comparables. Our second full quarter selling Microsulis Acculis MTA microwave ablation system internationally has been a big success, and they again delivered above plan. The strategic fit of microwave ablation technology, coupled with radiofrequency ablation and NanoKnife's irreversible electroporation, is a compelling value proposition for customers as they choose the best technology for them and their patients. This quarter, top line NanoKnife growth was a lower-than-usual due to a few delayed capital deals, but our pipeline, I'll tell you, is rich and we fully expect to meet our full year goals. NanoKnife electrodes were up 30% year-over-year worldwide, which is representative of, of course, growing procedural revenue and volume. Clinical papers continue to come out in peer-reviewed journals on NanoKnife's clinical progress. Also this quarter, we are meeting with the FDA to discuss a new pancreas IDE submission, which we will submit once they agree to our new protocol. The one area where we must improve is in our U.S. Vascular Access business. We have had now 2 quarters of pro forma year-over-year decline, which we've -- so while we've made progress and have an exciting new product with BioFlo, we're clearly not there yet. Our U.S. Vascular Access sales force has had the most attrition of our U.S. businesses, not quite 20% but just about, and currently needs the most attention of the 3. I attribute our temporary challenges in this area to: one, the lack of a tip location product on the market today; two, continued price competition in the dialysis market; and three, a need for greater training of our organization, quite frankly. To date, we've mostly filled the vacancies as a result of this attrition. We've recently conducted a national training meeting to reinforce product training to our sellers of new lines. And we've stepped up our global marketing efforts of BioFlo and are on schedule through research and development to put BioFlo on not only ports but our dialysis products, which we expect to be available on the first quarter of fiscal 2014. Also, we just executed a global distribution deal for our tip location technology that we expect to launch in early fiscal 2014. Our challenges in this business are temporary, and I firmly believe that we will be a double-digit grower in this business in the future. I will say the early signs of BioFlo's clinical acceptance are awesome. We are seeing early clinical success consistent with the results I shared with you a couple of quarters back. More importantly, they're happening at big-name institutions. Today, over 100 hospitals nationwide have either converted to or in the process of evaluating BioFlo only after being on the market for 2 months. As this technology increases adoption in the PICC business and gets launched next year with dialysis and ports, watch out. We've had short-term challenges, but we're addressing all the issues and building towards future growth. Turning to our acquisition of Vortex Medical and the AngioVac product, our sales and marketing teams in our peripheral vascular franchise have been preparing for a full launch in this fiscal fourth quarter of 2013. 2Q sales were negligible as we only had the product for 30 days and our sales force wasn't close to being trained. We will be extensively training our entire PV sales force throughout third quarter, as well as hiring a dedicated clinical specialist team to support the expected uplift in adoption. Last month at the VP meeting in New York, there were several presentations by key thought leaders. We are very pleased with the early reception of this device and expect it to be a key contributor to our growth going forward. We look forward to demonstrating the device for you at our upcoming Analyst Day in January. On the litigation front, I want to give you an update. First, as we've previously announced, we were awarded $16.5 million plus interest against biolitec in an indemnification case. The judgment has recently been entered in New York. And within the month, we will be clear to pursue all available U.S. assets of biolitec in an attempt to satisfy our judgment. We also continue to aggressively pursue them in our Massachusetts case, seeking to include the assets of the German parent company biolitec AG as we do not believe the U.S. assets alone will satisfy the damages. Second, as many of you are aware, Bard had filed suit pretty much against all court manufacturers for the marking of power injection on ports. AngioDynamics filed a request with PTO for re-examination of Bard's patents. Our argument and request was granted and virtually all of the claims in Bard's patents were rejected. The case has now been stayed indefinitely, pending the resolution of the PTO process. This is a terrific victory for our legal team. With that, and before I turn it over to Mark Frost, our incoming CFO, I would like to take a moment to thank Joe Gersek for his extremely valuable and steady leadership through 5 challenging years in AngioDynamics' history. His wisdom, decision-making and integrity will remain a bedrock here at the company. Joe, thank you very much for your service. For now I would like to turn it over to Mark Frost to help us lead ourselves into the next era for this company. Mark?