Earnings Labs

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BDX)

Q4 2018 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 6, 2018

$144.66

-3.21%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-1.59%

1 Week

-2.58%

1 Month

-1.77%

vs S&P

+2.24%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, and welcome to BD's Fourth Fiscal Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2018 Earnings Call. At the request of BD, today's call is being recorded. It will be available for replay through November 13, 2018 on the Investors page of bd.com, or by phone using 800-585-8367 for domestic calls and area code 404-537-3406 for international calls using confirmation number 3197559. I would like to inform all parties that your lines have been placed on a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer segment. Beginning today's call is Monique Dolecki, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Dolecki, you may begin the conference. Monique N. Dolecki - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Thank you, Crystal. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review our fourth fiscal quarter results. As we referenced in our press release, we are presenting a set of slides to accompany our remarks on this call. The presentation is posted on the Investor Relations page of our website at bd.com. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, and it is possible that actual results could differ from our expectations. Factors that could cause such differences appear in our fourth fiscal quarter press release and in the MD&A sections of our recent SEC filings. We will also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures with respect to our performance. Reconciliations to GAAP measures can be found in our press release and its related financial schedules and in the slides. A copy of the release, including the financial schedules, is posted on the bd.com website. In the fourth quarter, the company recorded $58 million in non-cash charges to write down the carrying value of assets primarily within our Diabetes Care business. Following a limited launch of our insulin infusion sets in fiscal 2017, and a product redesign in early FY 2018,…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is coming from the line of David Lewis with Morgan Stanley. David Ryan Lewis - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Good morning. Just two quick ones for me. I'll start with Chris or Vince. So, guys, the headwinds are consistent with our model, but clearly the magnitude of each is a little greater. So I think from our emails this morning, the questions that I think investors want to get answered is does fiscal 2019 earnings reflect any change in the underlying fundamentals of the business with a rate of progression of the Bard deal model? Or is this just a perfect storm of macro headwinds? And then I have a quick follow-up. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure, David. And this is Chris. Thanks for the question. I think you look at the momentum that we had in fiscal year 2018, we were driving 6.5% revenue growth and 16% earnings per share growth, and that momentum actually accelerated in the fourth quarter with 8.4% revenue growth, 25% increase in EPS, and 350 basis points of gross margin improvement. So clearly the fundamentals of the business are very strong, and we carry that forward into 2019. If you refer to the waterfall chart that we went through, you can see that we're driving 16% to 17% underlying into 2019. And then on top of that, we're adding another 3% from tax synergies that we had talked about potentially developing, and we now see our way clear to get those from tax synergies and some geographical mix. So the combination of those two are driving underlying improvements of around 20%. Now, when you issued your note a couple of weeks ago, you had rightfully called out some significant headwinds of around 800 basis…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Brian Weinstein with William Blair. Brian David Weinstein - William Blair & Co. LLC: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Brian David Weinstein - William Blair & Co. LLC: Just a follow-up on David's question there, obviously, a very strong year-end with the 8.4% growth, but maybe, Tom, can you talk about the sustainability of the trends that you're seeing, and specifically the drivers. Vince, you mentioned a little bit in Medical, but specifically maybe the Interventional and Life Sciences side as we head into 2019? Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, I'll let Tom do that. I kind of overviewed that in the remarks, but Tom, maybe you can get into a little more detail. Thomas Polen - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Hey, Brian, this is Tom. So, I think, as you heard from Vince, what we were most pleased about is, is that there was strong growth across all three segments, and it was both in the core across all three segments as well as what you saw where new products starting to fire in each of the three segments. And so as we think about Medical, again, we've got core strong underlying businesses with Pyxis ES as a new product really gaining traction and share this year. We saw the new Alaris Pump M2 (49:44) really be widely positively received in the marketplace. We expect about 2 points of share gain in FY 2018 on the pump side, and that continuing into 2019. And then the momentum in Pharm Systems, as you heard Vince mention, driven by both the trend in vial to prefill, but also around biologic and self-injection and some of the portfolio…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Isaac Ro with Goldman Sachs. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Good morning, guys. Thank you. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Good morning. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Hey, guys. So, just a question on a couple of key pipeline items, maybe on the Medical side. Vince, you mentioned a little bit about status on the T2 Patch Pump. Can you give us a little bit more detail as to the initial strategy for rollout at the end of 2019? And then secondly, for Patrick on the Life Sciences business, BD MAX has been doing pretty well for a while now. Can you give us a sense of where we are in the life cycle for that product? I think competition in molecular is getting a little bit thicker, so I'd be interested in where you go from here. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Alberto will take the first one and then Patrick will do the second. Alberto Mas - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. Well, on the Type 2 Patch Pump, we are – continue to be very excited about the potential of the product. We are making good progress on the program. We are learning through our clinical trials and the interactions with our customers. And we expect to be preparing for a submission in the next few months both in U.S. and Europe. Our production lines are getting up to speed, and we are working our evidence generation programs as well. So the program is progressing well, and we're expecting – depending obviously on the FDA approval process and timing we expect towards the end of the calendar year to be able to launch in the U.S.,…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Robbie Marcus with JPMorgan.

Robbie J. Marcus - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Chris, just to follow up on the capital allocation question there, you've hit your payback targets. You're now less than 4 times as of September. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Right.

Robbie J. Marcus - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

In a year where there are a number of headwinds, how do you balance maybe using some of the money allocated for debt paydown to help cover some of the macro headwinds? And in that, are there any other rooms, levers or ways that you can offset some of those macro headwinds that maybe isn't built into guidance here? Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, I don't see it being a cash-driven issue in terms of offsetting the headwinds. I think we're investing significant cash in the business in a number of ways, as we just talked about, CapEx for capacity purposes. And so, we feel good about that, and we're generating a lot of cash, as you see. So we think we can do both. We think we can invest in the business to continue to grow the business, as you would expect, and to still make our commitments on the debt paydown. And so we've got about 1 point left or 1 times left, and I would expect that to be ratable over the next two years. So another 0.5 point this year and another 0.5 point next year, and we'll be down below 3 times. So we think we can do both of those items.

Robbie J. Marcus - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Okay, great. And maybe to stay in that vein, I don't want to jump the gun, but you've now had a fairly successful CareFusion integration. Bard looks to be going ahead of plan. How do you think about now with the very broad hospital platform that you have, how do you think about continued M&A? And are there any areas that stand out to you that you think need the most adding to, or could be bulked up here? Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, thanks for the question. And we're really focused on integrating what we have right now. We're just finishing up. As we said, pretty much just finished CareFusion. We're focused on the Bard integration. And we know from a strategic standpoint that we have an excellent portfolio. We're going to continue to do small plug-ins. It's the nature of the business. You saw it with TVA. So you should expect that our focus is going to be debt paydown and continuing to enhance the portfolio in ways that really build up what we'll call category management. We think we've positioned ourselves to be one of the strategic partners of choice within the industry. That doesn't require us to get much, much bigger and broader. It's about playing out what we have and becoming the partner of choice as we drive – as we're driving these synergies, you should think about this as also driving the customer experience. We're going after simplification, making BD easier to do business with, that's the phase we're in right now. In the long run, we know we'll have the capability if we ever desired to make another larger move, but it's great to have strategic flexibility. But as Tom and Chris and I are always discussing, that's not what you want to base your strategy on. It's great to have capability. We're going to drive our innovation system, do our plug-in acquisitions. That's what we're focused on – and process simplification – getting our synergies. And thanks for the question.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the link of Bob Hopkins with Bank of America.

Bob Hopkins - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Oh, thank you, and good morning. Just two quick questions. First, just to clarify on resin costs, can you just talk a little bit more about the supply constraints and when do those ease, and when they ease, do the cost come down? Thank you. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. So the issue is the supply constraint on propylene which is actually a byproduct of ethylene, and ethylene production has significantly reduced. So it's a byproduct of that. And we saw that happening just from a supply standpoint. We are seeing a little bit of capacity coming in from outside the U.S. You may recall, there was a supplier that went bankrupt in the propylene area. We had some hurricane issues over the last year or so. So the combination of all those factors are what's driving the capacity constraints. There is some positives of capacity coming in from international sources, but at the same time you have oil price impacts as well. So we think that the impact that we're seeing in the fourth quarter of that double-digit increase will kind of hold for this year. But we don't see that continuing to go up in the future. We think it will be fairly stable over the course of the year.

Bob Hopkins - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Okay, great. And then the follow up, I just wanted to ask a question on MMS because that's obviously very exceptional growth in that business this particular quarter. So maybe if you could just kind of quantify where you are in terms of pump market share, how much share you think you're gaining. And then I'd just be curious as to – if you could explain a little bit more about your comment that you're seeing placements earlier than expected. What are the dynamics around that? Thank you. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Alberto will take that. Alberto Mas - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yes. Well, obviously, great performance in the quarter. We saw 20%-plus growth rate in both sides of the business, both dispensing and infusion. A lot of these dynamics – well, in terms of the actual timing, it's timing of infusion pump placements and installations. But also on the Pyxis side, on the dispensing side, the variability especially after trades comes more – (01:02:00) there's a component of our business that continues to be capital purchases, cash purchases, if you like. This is affected by timing. And in terms of the timing, it's a combination of customer expectations and when they're ready and readiness, as well as our own preparedness, availability of service and installation, and resources at the same time. So that combination drives some of the timing. What I would emphasize is more of the underlying growth rate of the business overall, which we – we expect the momentum to continue. The market share is – we estimate around 2 percentage point share gain on the infusion side, and 1% on the dispensing. A lot of that – and then Tom mentioned some of the investments in the core, or our anchor products like the M2 (01:02:53), like Pyxis ES and so on. But what really is driving a lot of these conversions and momentum in the business is our integrated and connected strategy through our interoperability capabilities. We now have over 350 sites that are now live there as well as our HealthSight platform, analytics that really enables that integration and capability that is unique from our perspective.

Bob Hopkins - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Great. Very helpful. Thank you. Alberto Mas - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Okay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Larry Biegelsen with Wells Fargo.

Lawrence Biegelsen - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Oh, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Good morning, Larry.

Lawrence Biegelsen - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

One on the fiscal 2019 revenue guidance and one on Lutonix, and I'll start with the revenue guidance. So you exited the year growing 8.4%, and as someone mentioned earlier, it's prudent I think to guide to 5% to 6%. But my question is, Chris, you talked about it being more back-end loaded. So just trying to understand why that would be the case. Q1 is the easiest comp I think in the year. That's my first question, and then I had a follow-up. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, so there's two things. The flu grow over (64:12) is in the first half of the year, and then as we talked about MMS, that 23% growth in MMS in the fourth quarter with these earlier placements that – some of that's going to come out of the first quarter, and that's on the revenue side. And as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, FX will hit us on the bottom line in the first quarter. So that's the reason for the comments on phasing.

Lawrence Biegelsen - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Thank you. And then on Lutonix, assuming a positive outcome tomorrow, I think Bard estimated that the BTK opportunity was about $250 million. So my question is, assuming a positive outcome tomorrow, do you agree with that? And is reimbursement in place and sufficient to kind of drive that opportunity? Thanks for taking the questions. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Simon? Simon Campion - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. So nothing has materially changed from the Bard projections with respect to the market opportunity for BTK, and it's going to – the expectation is it will be continued to be reimbursed as any traditional DCB.

Lawrence Biegelsen - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Thank you. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: So, very much in line with what we expected. Okay, thanks for the questions.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Kristen Stewart with Barclays.

Kristen Stewart - Barclays Investment Bank

Management

Hi. I have two questions. The first one, I know you touched a little bit on this, but I was wondering if you could just go in a little bit more in terms of the opportunity relative to the Patch Pump. I know you discontinued the sets. How did you frame that opportunity relative to the Patch Pump? And then I have a second question for Chris. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Okay. Tom? Thomas Polen - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Hey, Kristen. This is Tom.

Kristen Stewart - Barclays Investment Bank

Management

Hey, Tom. Thomas Polen - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: So, first off, just to speak to FlowSmart a little bit more, certainly the type 1 insulin pump market, it's continued to evolve over the last few years. And as was mentioned earlier on the call, the latest product redesign for FlowSmart didn't deliver the level of differentiation that we were seeking. And so, look, we could have continued to invest in FlowSmart. If you would ask us that, yes, we could have continued to invest in that. But given the economics of that as more of an OEM product and the number of more attractive investment opportunities we now have in our R&D pipeline, as part of our portfolio process we made a decision to stop that product and redirect the investments into more attractive opportunities both within DC and outside of DC. And certainly within DC, the number one product there that we're investing behind and put some further funding behind is Swatch (66:37). And as you heard from Alberto, we continue to be – very positive outlook on that product. It's gone through and continues to go through clinical trials. We continue to get additional patient and physician feedback on it which is all at or above our expectations. And so, we're doubling-down on the final stage of bringing this to market this year.

Kristen Stewart - Barclays Investment Bank

Management

Perfect. And then not to jump too, too far ahead, but it looks like the Gore royalty has been running a lot higher than where it was trending with Bard. And I was just wondering if you could kind of just give us your perspective on ability to grow through that. I know that's not really a big impact for fiscal 2019, just given the timing of when the royalty ends, but how should we just think about longer term? Clearly, this year, you had mentioned it sounds like you're running a little bit ahead of the deal model. Does that give you increased confidence to offset some of those headwinds, or just how should we think about kind of Gore? I know that's a little bit out, but... Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: So, yeah, Kristen, this is Chris. And you're right that the Gore royalty is running a little bit hotter. But fundamentally, it's no change from what we talked about when we announced the deal, that the biggest impacts in reducing that is the paydown of the debt and the corresponding decrease in interest expense, coupled with now we talk about revenue synergies, and they start in 2019 and ramp-up a little bit more in 2020. So, that helps. The cost synergies again mitigate that, and then the conversion of the preferred dividend helps a little bit as well. So, fundamentally, it's the same offsets, and so that's what we would expect to see. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Thanks for the questions, Kristen.

Kristen Stewart - Barclays Investment Bank

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar - Evercore ISI

Management

Hey, guys. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Good morning, Vijay.

Vijay Kumar - Evercore ISI

Management

Thanks for taking the questions. Morning, Chris. Just maybe back on that margin question, so if you look at the deal model, Chris, that we had, 200 basis points of annual margin expansion right through 2020. I'm just looking at the guidance here. What would cause this to get to low end of the operating margin guidance for the year? Because I can understand some of the headwinds getting to the high end of the margin guidance, maybe even at the midpoint, but the low end, I'm having a tough time. So, can you just walk us through versus the deal model...? Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. So, you're talking about 2019?

Vijay Kumar - Evercore ISI

Management

Yes. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. So, on an underlying basis, the operating margin expansion would be over 200 basis points, which is right in line with what we expected. You get about a 80 basis point, somewhere in there, 50 to 100 basis point drag from the raw materials, resins, tariffs and the divestitures. So, all-in all-in, we've got about 100 to 150 basis points of margin expansion, which is right in line with what we had originally announced. And just as a reminder, I mean, we say this. We're really proud of the fact that we've driven 700 basis points through to-date from FY 2015. And then with 100 to 150 next year and more than likely the same kind of amount in 2020, over a five-year period, we'll have driven about 1,000 basis points of margin expansion. So, we really feel good about margin expansion, including next year.

Vijay Kumar - Evercore ISI

Management

Got you. And then one on tax rate, so it's down year-on-year. Is this now sustainable, Chris, or were there any one-off assumptions for the tax guide for 2019? Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, so it's not one-off. It's really driven by the normal geographical mix and the synergies of bringing BD and Bard together and the tax structures we talked about. And we said that would take the better part of a year to sort through, and the 14% to 16% is a reflection of that.

Vijay Kumar - Evercore ISI

Management

Thank you, guys. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Richard Newitter with Leerink Partners.

Richard Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Management

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Vince, my first one, just on the $250 million Bard revenue synergies by 2022, I might have missed it, but can you just talk through how to think about the cadence there over that time period, and if you can talk to the different buckets, which ones materialize at which times? Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. So, I'll start and then Tom can add a little bit more color to it. But first thing to think about is the vascular access portfolio. We've put the sales forces together in the U.S. We've got that as one business in MDS. And that we're able to go in and starting right now sell an optimized portfolio of products, including the PICCs. And so we think that when you look at 2019, we're talking about tens of basis points for fiscal year 2019 and then things ramping up from there. The other thing that's contributing to that in the short run is, we've hired the sales force in Europe, and on the Surgery side, and that's around biosurgery and ChloraPrep. And so we've brought them on. We're activating those sells reps. So those are two good things that are going on. And the third piece is the geographic expansion piece. China, they already have the organization in place. We're continuing doing that. But in places like Latin America and Asia, they come on stream and then they accelerate the growth once you get past 2019. Tom, you want to add anything else to that? Thomas Polen - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: That was a great summary. The only maybe two things to mention from the other third pillar, so Vince talked about vascular access, the channel expansion in Europe, as you know, Bard had really invested heavily in China, and we're also continuing to invest now in areas where they hadn't got to invest yet, like Latin America, EMA, and the rest of Asia. From a timing and phasing over the five-year window that we've talked about, we think about obviously very limited synergies this last year; 2019, it does step up. And then 2020, it kind of doubles off of where we were in 2019 and then it stays relatively at that level, maybe modest increases of those additional gains for the next two years after that. So, certainly, 2019 is a step-up, but then 2020 continues to step up more ratably. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah.

Richard Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Management

Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you very much. And then if I could just ask, I think I heard a comment earlier on in the call that China growth moderated, and maybe I'm just looking at the wrong numbers. But it looked like 13% growth constant currency for China this quarter, last quarter, roughly the same. What was that comment about specifically? Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: That was me. Yeah, I actually said it grew 13% in the quarter. But looking forward, I said we expected it to be low-double digits next year. And all I mentioned was that we had very strong performance across the board. We expected that to continue, that the whole industry had seen a little bit of cost control that was put in place. This is no new news. We had exceptional performance in our Life Sciences side of the business. So we expect basically the same performance, maybe a tick lower, that's all.

Richard Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Management

Okay. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, I would say, most of that tick lower was related to math because we're growing about the same amount of revenue dollars off a bigger base. And so it steps down a point or two from that alone. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. But thanks for the chance to clarify that.

Richard Newitter - Leerink Partners LLC

Management

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel with Cowen.

Unknown Speaker

Management

Hey. Good morning. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Good morning.

Unknown Speaker

Management

This is Chris (74:49) on for Doug today. Thanks for taking my questions. As a follow up to your previous question, could you just provide a breakdown of the key drivers to margin expansion in 2019? Now, how do cost synergies, core execution and the inclusion of Bard contribute to the 100 to 150 bps of target expansion? Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Hold on one second. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. So, the base plan initiatives are up about 150 basis points. The synergies add about 50 and then the Bard portfolio is about another 10 or 20 basis points. That gets you up to about 200 basis points. And then, as I mentioned, the resins, tariffs, flus and the divestiture pressures are in the 80 to 100 kind of range, which brings you to total of about 100 to 150 basis points.

Unknown Speaker

Management

Great. Thank you. Then maybe just a unrelated follow-up. You ended 2018 with about 7% growth in Life Sciences business, guidance for next year is 4% to 5%. I think you called out flu as being 90 basis points headwind, so guidance for next year still implies a moderation in growth beyond just difficult flu comparisons. I mean, with that in mind, what else is impacting Life Sciences' growth next year? And can you just comment on the underlying sustainable revenue growth rate for that business? Thank you. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, Patrick will take that. Patrick Kaltenbach - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yes. I'm happy to take that. First and foremost, if you look at this year's growth rate, of course, we had also a tailwind from the flu. So if you take flu out, we had been growing between 5% and 6% as well this year, so that's my first point. And forward-looking, I think what we are looking at is an underlying market growth somewhere between 4% to 5% in overall Life Sciences. If you take the flu headwind this year out and say we will grow between 5% and 6%, we will actually achieve that goal to grow at the high end, if not above the market with our product portfolio. I'm very confident that with the product portfolio we will roll out next year and what we did this year, we have a strong momentum in the Life Sciences market. We see a lot of opportunity in the immunology space, diagnostics base, and new solutions we have in the Preanalytical portfolio as well. So, again, the fundamentals are strong and I think we are positioned well. The 4% to 5% are really based on the fact that we account for the 90 basis points in flu. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. Yeah, the only other thing I'd point out is we had the FlowJo acquisition in the current year, and that was worth probably 40 basis points. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah, so that kind of tricks up the comparison a little bit. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

Management

Okay. Great. Thank for taking my questions.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Quirk with Piper Jaffray. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Great. Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Good morning. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Two questions, I guess, first, Vince, just following up on Rich's question about the pacing of revenue synergies, can you speak to the pacing for CareFusion kind of – or maybe, Tom, in the next couple of years? And then, secondly, for Patrick, regarding the changes to Medicare reimbursement around the respiratory and GI panels, it strikes us that BD is in a pretty good position here given how you've set your panels up, so I would just love a comment on that changing dynamic and I suppose the potential for commercial payers to follow Medicare? Thanks, guys. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: All right. So, Tom is going to talk to the CareFusion. Thomas Polen - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Okay. Hey, Bill. This is Tom. So, on CareFusion, we continue to be very much on track to realize the $175 million in cumulative CareFusion synergies by FY 2019. And so we're coming to the tail end of that process of course now. As we've talked about before, we've seen the tens of bps impact, and I think you're seeing that across the Medical segment, which is where that's all focused, and it's specifically within the MDS International business and MMS, which I think you've seen really the acceleration from what – remember when we started the journey there, was an underlying CareFusion growth rate of 3% to 3.5% growth that obviously based on what you saw in 2018 we're exiting and going into 2019 at a number well north of…

Operator

Operator

Our final question comes from the line of Amit Hazan with Citigroup.

Amit Hazan - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Management

Oh, hey. Good morning. Thanks. Hey. Good morning. Thanks. Let me ask my first one on the Bard synergies on the cost side. Just wondering, now we're kind of nearing almost a year since the close, what's your visibility now versus the year ago as to whether your cost synergy target has room to improve over the original guide? Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. So, thanks for the question, Amit. I think one thing I would point to is the tax synergies, which were not included in the initial amount. We typically don't show them, but did come to fruition. We did about $75 million in 2018 and those were the types of synergies that you get from the duplication of public company costs and some procurement. So the visibility to those typically is very high. The next bucket that you would think of the next $100 million is the integration of systems and processes and functions. And we are in the execution stage of that. I feel really good about it, but you want to see that. And then, the third bucket is distribution centers and plants, et cetera, and that takes a while. So, we're just coming into the phase where we'll see the execution of those two buckets, which are really the ones that are the more difficult to get and takes a lot of execution. So, nothing that we see at this point would enable us to call an increase to that $300 million beyond the tax, but that's something that we're right in the middle of execution on, so a while longer before we can predict it for 2020.

Amit Hazan - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Management

Thanks. And just last one, then on Interventional business and Surgery and actually hernia in particular, even if I exclude Progel and the hurricane, it seems to be trending slower than what Bard was doing pre the acquisition. Obviously, a big part of Bard's success in recent years was coming from share gains in hernia, so I'm just wondering if you can give us some color on growth trends in your hernia platform and what you expect there in the coming year. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Sure. Simon will do that for you. Simon Campion - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: So, I think, as you said, we've just come off the hurricane and Progel and we're in the process of regaining some of the share that we've lost. You saw a reacceleration in Q4 for us. We do expect that to continue, but clearly there remains work to be done. So that's what we're looking at moving forward. And then, as Vince said earlier on, we are looking at geographic expansion here now as well, and we expect to – for that to be able to accelerate our momentum moving forward too. So, we're pretty happy with where we sit right now, and we're looking forward to executing on the synergies that we've rolled up. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Yeah. All in all, the overall Interventional segment is doing very, very well. And the recovery program from the hurricane was not just getting the production back in place, but of course, there was a lot of competitive inventory in the channel that we had to go and deal with. The team has done a fantastic job on that in getting that back. And we expect that to continue in 2019, but the overall business is doing well. So, we expect that recovery to continue in 2019, but thanks for the question.

Operator

Operator

At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the floor back over to Vince Forlenza for closing remarks. Vincent A. Forlenza - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: So, thank you very much for your participation and your questions. Let me just finish with some final thoughts. We had a very strong finish to the year, and I feel incredibly proud of our performance and what this team has done. The combination of BD and Bard continues to deliver exceptional value to our customers and our shareholders. And lastly, we have good momentum going into fiscal year 2019, and we look forward to updating you next time. Thank you very much. Christopher R. Reidy - Becton, Dickinson & Co.: Thanks, everyone.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.