Steve Cutler
Analyst · Jack Meehan. Your line is open
Thank you, Jonathan and good day everyone. It's an exciting day for ICON and a significant industry milestone, as we announce that ICON has agreed to acquire PRA Health Sciences, one of the world's leading CROs with over 19,000 employees and offices in 42 countries. This strategic transaction brings together two high-quality, innovative, growing organizations with similar culture and values, combining to become a world-leading health care intelligence and clinical CRO. With the addition of PRA, ICON will create a new paradigm for bringing clinical research to patients, offering expanded capabilities to customers, and growth opportunities for employees, while delivering significant shareholder value. There are several key strategic reasons why we have decided to proactively unite our organizations at this time. First, by joining together, we will significantly enhance our operational scale, which is essential to meeting current and future customer demands. With broader and deeper service, geographic and therapeutic offerings, and extensive data-driven health care technology, we can deliver enhanced solutions for all customers, increasing access to patients and reducing development time and cost. The combined businesses will have over 35,000 employees across the globe, pro forma revenue of approximately $6 billion, and will be number one or two across all key clinical CRO market segments. The united companies have a highly complementary customer base through strategic partnerships with the majority of the world's top biopharma companies, providing a platform for sustainable growth. Secondly, ICON and PRA share a common focus on leveraging data and applying technology to execute clinical trials and post-approval studies with the highest quality and speed. The pandemic has accelerated the transformation of the clinical trial landscape and opened up significant opportunities to decentralize trials. We believe this trend is here to stay. And by integrating capabilities, including PRA's mobile and connected health platforms, real-world data and information solutions with ICON's global site network, home health services and wearables expertise, we can deliver truly differentiated, decentralized and hybrid trial solutions. Continuing to build on our patient site and data strategy has been a primary focus at ICON. And with the addition of PRA's technology and expertise, we will innovate and evolve our strategy in this area, which will continue to be at the forefront of our strategic priorities. And finally, from a shareholder perspective, as outlined in our press release and accompanying slide deck, the transaction is anticipated to be highly accretive, delivering double-digit accretion in the first full year and growing to 20% plus thereafter. This will be driven by growth momentum, estimated annual cost synergies of $150 million, and a combined effective tax rate decreasing to 14%, both to be realized in approximately four years. We also expect to further leverage our industry-leading global business services platform to generate strong and sustainable EPS growth over the longer term. ICON and PRA are proactively consolidating from positions of strength in an expanding market, which will enable us to take full advantage of the current robust industry demand as evidenced by the quarter four bookings reported by both companies. We are confident that our focus in the clinical development space will continue to engage our customers and drive strong growth over the longer term. Our combined strength in delivering global functional and full-service clinical solutions is industry-leading, and we believe the need for these larger scale, flexible solutions will continue to grow. The complementary nature of our services will also present revenue synergies across our broader customer base. We see near-term opportunities in areas such as Central and Specialty Labs, the Accellacare Site Network, language services, home health, early phase, mobile health, and data information solutions. Most importantly, at the heart of both our companies are our people, and notably, ICON and PRA share a common culture focused on operational excellence, customer delivery, technology application, and employee development. The strength of our cultures has been evident during the current COVID pandemic, where our people have demonstrated great strength and resilience. As a combined company with expanded capabilities and expertise, we expect to offer employees exciting roles and significant career development opportunities within and across the key service areas and geographies in the company. The combined company will be headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. I will serve as the Chief Executive Officer, and Brendan will serve as the Chief Financial Officer. Ciaran Murray will serve as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. PRA will nominate two Directors to join the ICON Board, one of whom I'm delighted to say will be Colin. Both ICON and PRA have a solid track record of delivery, and highly experienced management teams who have a strong history of integrating successful businesses. To ensure our continued success, we will harness the outstanding leadership and talent that resides in both organizations to deliver operational excellence and continue our focus and mission on patient-centered drug and device development. Before turning over the call to Colin, I'd like to thank the ICON and PRA teams who put together this transaction over the last couple of months. They've all worked extremely hard, and we're very grateful to them. And with that, I'll turn it over to Colin.