James Saccaro
Analyst · JP Morgan. Your line is now open
Overall, if you look at 2017, we've purchased the company for approximately $600 million, we also repurchased approximately $600 million worth of shares and so if you put that in the context of free cash flow of $1.2 billion, we essentially deployed all of it. Now our objective is not relative to a free cash flow number but I can tell you that we intend to be active, both on the business development front and on the buyback front. I talked to you in the past about how we think about buyback; we have an internal model which calculates the value of the shares, and as we look at the share price we look at opportunities to purchase shares relative to that looking for a discount. I mean, typically the share is traded at a discount so we are active buyers in the marketplace. We expect to continue to do this through 2018 and we also expect to continue to do a number of bolt-on transactions, of course and Joe will speak to this in a moment; for us we have to be very disciplined about business development and so it's not just about doing deals, it's about doing very positive deals for our company. Similar to this Mallinckrodt deal. As far as the guidance, we have embedded some incremental guidance, we've been repurchasing shares in the quarter, this current quarter we expect about $500 million worth of buyback currently planned although I expect this is not the final number, it will be different than that and it will be based on the mechanics that I described earlier. Joe, you want to talk about business development?
José Almeida: Sure. So going back to the team of capital allocation, I think Jay described pretty accurately our ability to do all of those things together. Our intention is to look at our businesses on an adjacency basis and do those incremental deals at a higher volume and velocity, meaning, more of them and a little faster as we continue to refine our M&A group, our M&A group is now complete, we have very strategic group in place, we have a pretty well defined boundaries where we want to go and I never take no, never considered that larger acquisitions are completely off the table, they are just difficult to come by and they are much more difficult to-date to get decent returns on those. But we -- as we look opportunistic at many different things, our focus in M&A and strategy are the cases it's going to continue to do that. But we can do the three things that we have planned all along; we continue to buy shares, we're going to continue to pay the dividends and increase dividends every year like we have done in the past, and do the small deals or deals which are complimentary in high volume and velocity.