Joseph Darling
Analyst · First Analysis. Your line is open
Thank you, Sylvia, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2018 earnings call. While our recent challenges have been well documented and will discuss those further shortly, we are pleased with our financial results in the second quarter and remain confident in our ability to drive growth and shareholder value. Our results were primarily driven by growth in our U.S. viscosupplementation business and improved operational performance which demonstrate the strength of our business and the success of our initiatives to improve our financial and operational performance. Before we dive into the financial and operational updates for the quarter, I want to take a moment to provide my high level perspective on the business and why we are confident that Anika is well positioned to continue its transformation into a fully integrated commercial company. We have had a history of having too little control over our own destiny, as our contracts are structured such that our partners determined end market pricing and other decisions for a large portion of our exceptional product line. However, our capabilities and expertise go far beyond those of just a contract manufacturer. As I will detail shortly, we are actively working to gain greater control of our future as a company under new leadership and with new commercial and strategic initiatives to accelerate growth. When I first joined Anika, I was excited to be a part of such an innovative, high growth, profitable and global orthopedic company. Anika has a diversified portfolio of differentiated market leading therapeutic products and an emerging orthopedic medicine pipeline with tremendous potential. I knew that I was joining the company at a pivotal moment and that we would likely encounter some challenges as we work to position Anika for the future. Importantly, despite our recent initiatives, my excitement and optimism for the future of Anika is stronger than ever. Anika is a growth company and I am confident that we have the opportunities and resources to accelerate our revenue and earnings growth over the next several years and beyond. I was appointed CEO in March of this year, a couple of weeks before the end of our first quarter. Since that time, we have begun a thorough evaluation of our strategy, operations and performance. I wanted to make sure that we were maximizing our current opportunities while also enhancing our near and mid-term growth trajectory. We quickly identified several opportunities where we can further optimize our commercial reach in operational processes and refocus our resources to continue to improve our financial performance. Importantly, we're making significant progress towards realizing these opportunities. The first focus area is improving our distributor engagement outside the U.S. with oversight and performance in the international markets where I believe we are not currently getting our fair share of the market. In the U.S., we still see either a direct correlation model or a hybrid direct with partnership approach has optimal. However internationally, we see a clear opportunity to improve our processes for managing international markets and distributors in order to optimize our OUS performance. In order to jumpstart our international growth, we will be working closely with our distribution partners to increase our collaboration and involvement within country programs and initiatives to generate improved awareness of our product portfolio and company. To that end, I am proud to say we recently hired a seasoned industry veteran with a strong track record of building successful international sales networks to assess our performance and ongoing initiatives in every region and to implement changes where necessary. I am confident that with the new expertise on the ground, we can drive greater international growth from our existing products and expand our commercial network. This new structure will also enable greater oversight of distributor led sales and marketing activities in order to ensure we optimize our returns and support our partners to improve their market penetration and overall performance. The second focus area is driving operational efficiency in the U.S. We recently hired a Vice President of Operation was been tasked with optimizing resource utilization, manufacturing, distribution and inventory management. We're already starting to see the benefits of his efforts. And over the coming months, we will be implementing enhancements to processes, systems and people to drive improved operational performance. As evidenced by these recent hires, we realize that we need to have the right team in place as we execute our initiatives. We are committed to supplementing, augmenting and reinforcing the talents throughout Anika. Based on my prior leadership experiences in larger organizations, I know that while innovation will always play a role in success, internal R&D alone is not enough to sustain the long term topline growth which we strive to deliver to our shareholders. To that end we realize that we also need the right product portfolio. We are actively focused on targeted partnerships and acquisitions to supplement and in some cases organic growth. We have already implemented focused in elevated efforts to define specific targets that will allow us to bridge the gap between MONOVISC our next generation of internally develop products such as CINGAL. We recently refocused the internal efforts of our Chief Technology and Strategy Officer towards business development activities and we are actively screening a number of product and technology company candidates that will enhance our portfolio and drive profitable growth for shareholders. In addition to these ongoing initiatives, we are currently developing a detailed five years strategic plan to deliver and sustain double digit revenue growth in 2019 and beyond. We look forward to outlining our strategic plan in the coming months. I'd like to now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Sylvia Cheung to review our second quarter financial results, before I provide more details about our ongoing initiatives to mitigate the recent challenges and enhance growth. Sylvia?