Vivek Jain
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Please proceed
Thanks, John. Good afternoon, everybody. Our third quarter was a very productive quarter, as we continue to drive revenue growth and increased EBITDA, which resulted in strong free cash flow and improved net income. It has been a very busy last 12 months operationally, as we have executed well to a large volume of activity, and have emerged stronger with positive financial and operational results that have us positioned very well for the opportunity to acquire Hospira Infusion Systems. We did have some bumps, backlog, and challenges over the last few quarters, but as of today, we have resolved most of them, and stand stronger to begin executing on the next evolution for ICU Medical. In addition to the recent quarterly financial results and a recap of the operational progress year-to-date, we wanted to continue the discussion from the last call on how our direct channel was executing well, and how we see that progressing into the medium-term and the actions we have taken, which will be beneficial to our margins in the future. Lastly, it has been roughly four weeks since we announced the Hospira acquisition, and we wanted to provide some initial color and thoughts. In Q3 of 2016, we generated revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EPS slightly above our initial expectations. We finished the quarter with approximately $97 million in revenue, resulting in reported revenue growth of just over 13% with negligible currency effects. Please note that some of this revenue growth was due to catching up from certain temporary production constraints mentioned on the last few calls, and some initial orders that came in a bit earlier than expected. Adjusted EBITDA came in just over $34 million, which was growth of 15% year-over-year, and adjusted EPS came in at $1.35, which was growth of 35% over last year. A portion of the EPS growth was driven by tax-related items, and Scott will provide more information on this in his remarks. Our cash conversions were very strong, and our cash and investment balance at quarter-end was approximately $430 million. Throughout the third quarter, we continue to have very solid performance from our direct lines of infusion and oncology, and our overall direct operations continue to generate positive momentum with 31% growth. Specifically, our direct Infusion and Oncology segments grew 35% and 42%, respectively, and critical care was up 12% due to some of the catch-up previously discussed. In our direct Infusion segment we had 35% growth, and again, some was due to earlier than expected conversions, but we continue to see stable utilization trends in our existing customer base and a growing number of new customers interested in working with ICU Medical. Our more focused selling efforts over the last 18 months have shown good results in getting back to the core value drivers of ICU around unique products, competitive value, and customer service. SwabCap, the key product from our Excelsior acquisition, has fully met our initial direct sales goals and, we believe, is on track to deliver our revenue commitments for the acquisition. As said on the previous call, we believe we will continue to see strong growth in our direct Infusion business for the balance of this year and into next year. In our direct Oncology segment, we achieved over 40% growth year-over-year and continue to believe that we are in the early stages of a very long-term growth opportunity. Last quarter, we talked about easier comps for Q2, but Q3 was more of a normal quarter last year. Our products enable hospitals to address the increasing regulatory guidelines being adopted, which are one of the many reasons we are expanding our customer base. Also, our growth has largely been driven by our historical product line, as our new ChemoLock product is still in the early stages of launch, but it will be a bigger part of our offering in 2017. Overall, we expect continued growth for our oncology portfolio in Q4 and into next year. Critical care turned out exactly as we described on the previous call, as we caught up on the production issues. We are closer to launching our new Cogent hemodynamic monitoring system and continue to be on target for a Q1 2017 launch. Let me move to OEM. Our overall OEM business declined approximately 16% in Q3. Our principal OEM customer declined 20% in Q3 year-over-year and was down 25% sequentially from Q2 of 2016. On the last call, we were extremely clear and said that we absolutely believed we would see declines in revenues from our principal OEM customer over the balance of this year, and that they would be at the smallest percentage of sales in many years at the Q4 exit run rate, but that our profitability would be generally in line in absolute dollars at our Q2 levels as our mix changed. That is exactly what happened here. All activities mentioned on the previous call relating to our newer OEM customers of Terumo, Medline, et cetera, are all moving forward. Let's talk about some of the operational activities year-to-date and what happened with gross margins in the quarter, and what we expect over the balance of the year and into next year. Gross margins improved roughly 100 basis points sequentially and are on track to improve again in the fourth quarter. On the last call, we detailed a lot of activities that have happened operationally. An update on the three items that impacted margins the most are as follows. First, relating to the closure of Slovakia, the bridge product we built in Slovakia is a few weeks away from being burnt off, and we will see the benefits in 2017. Second, the integration of SwabCap from Excelsior into our Salt Lake facility now has all processes and equipment validated. Lastly, the normal expectations on productivity gains and scaling up new products to ensure competitive positioning has been on the agenda of the operations team, and some important improvements have been made in overall productivity. These were all the items we call the high-hanging fruit that we started to describe in late 2015, and they are extremely important because they are primarily linked to our direct operations to keep improving our direct business. The value at stake here provides an offset to some of the currency benefits we have currently, and more importantly, protected us from the effect of potential volume declines from our principal OEM customer. Now, these improvements will help us be as competitive as we can in the new co. On previous calls, we stated that in the midst of all of these activities, we had some temporary production constraints that caused us to recognize additional costs in order to maintain our strong service levels with customers and had a negative impact on gross margins compared to our desired levels. As of today, all these issues are behind us, and all the right fundamental things are happening around the high-hanging fruit for continued value creation. And please remember most of our products are sold under long-term fixed price supply contracts. We've said many times we will not manage the business for some arbitrary EBITDA margin, and the same is true for gross margin. If it costs us a little more in any one quarter to solve our problems or serve customers, we would do it. And so we are not going to skimp here. And I mentioned this just, as we say; we are expecting to see improvements into Q4. From an operating expense standpoint, there's not much to talk about. Cash expenses in general, excluding transactional and nonrecurring items, are declining in the back half of this year, as we said before. The transaction with Hospira does bring some additional cost into the fourth quarter. Cash expenses, excluding transaction-related costs, will be up less than $1 million versus the first half of the year, primarily due to increased direct sales. Now, turning to guidance for the full year of 2016. We are increasing our revenue range to $375 million to $380 million. Our EBITDA target is increased to a range of $132 million to $134 million, and Scott will walk you through our adjusted EPS increase, which again does have some unique tax benefits. Okay, let's move to how all of this fits with Hospira. We announced our pending transaction to acquire Hospira approximately four weeks ago. We did this primarily on offense to create a leading pure play infusion company with a complementary full-line product portfolio, the ability to unify our distribution channels globally, and to provide compelling economics to stakeholders over time. But we did this also for some defensive reasons, as we had significant earnings exposure to a single customer. This transaction, after exploring many other options, was the best means to create additional value and control our own destiny over the long-term. Now we are getting more deeply involved in the integration planning each day and working with our soon-to-be-largest shareholder Pfizer and our new colleagues in Hospira, and our belief in the long-term value-creation remains intact. If I was to try to compare the Hospira opportunity to ICU Medical a few years ago, a lot would sound very similar. Much like ICU in 2013 and 2014, our view is Hospira and Infusion Systems has been in what we would call a prolonged transition period. During these transition periods, companies are less decisive when they are unsure about the long-term. Like our experience at ICU, we believe the Hospira business, with just some basic operational rigor, can improve its P&L in the medium to long-term. Our goals are just like ICU Medical or our previous experiences to first enhance margins, and then improve overall growth. We wanted to try to bookend the two basic scenarios we see unfolding for this acquisition. In the best case, we'll have better execution to improve our top-line performance, drive operational improvements, and improve cash conversions and returns. In the worst case, we continue to fight headwinds on the top-line, but we can still drive operational improvement and generate solid cash returns over time. Those are the exact same words we used to describe the opportunity for ICU a number of years ago, and either one of those cases, along with the defensive reality, justified the transaction. And just like ICU, there are a number of intrinsic value drivers, including high-quality or hard-to-reproduce production assets, sticky product categories, and the opportunities for more cash generation if we can prove with basic operational rigor. But what is different than our experience from ICU is the sheer size and scale of the work we have to do. This is a complex corporate carve out and has aspects of a turnaround in certain of the business lines at the same time. We do get to do this from a position of strength and stability in our base business, but it is still a very large project. We analyzed the transaction with our own view of performance, which we can see based on our insight of the marketplace. Our OEM businesses will soon become part of us. And we don't like it declining 16%, as it did this quarter, but we now have more tools and value in-hand to fix it, but it will take time, as it's more global, more entangled with a large company, and frankly has a little more baggage, given its recent history. And, as we said on the transaction call a month ago, the results in the short-term will get worse before they get better, similar to our first year here at ICU. I'm going through all of this not to talk down or talk up expectations, per se, but to make sure everyone is realistic about what we have to do here and the time it will take. We've had a lot of supportive investor calls where people have asked us, what's next? And frankly, that's not very logical to us, because nothing is next. We have to focus on getting to work on this opportunity. I'm sure there will be bigger bumps out there than we've experience to date, but we will overcome them over time. We feel that we've been very transparent with investors on our plans over the last few years and cautious with our own expectations, and we want and need that mentality to continue. Short-term outperformance is not likely with this transaction and it is important that people understand that. The first few quarters under our ownership will not be predictable and will be subject to all the expected difficulties of a carveout. If you are an investor that wants the predictability that ICU has offered in recent years that will be difficult to repeat over the near-term and into the medium-term. But when we get it right, long-term returns could be generated quickly like ICU. We believe that this was a logical evolution for both businesses. We feel we've been able to put together a transaction that didn't risk the enterprise and still left real room for value creation for investors. If you are an investor who has liked the vertical that ICU operates in but were uncomfortable with the customer concentration risk, perhaps this transaction can provide the catalyst to show the path to investment. And if you are an existing ICU investor, we appreciate your support in advance, and hope you feel that this action provides sensible, risk-mitigating capital deployment, and an opportunity for increased value in the medium to long-term. We had told investors over the last two years that if you did not have a distinct point of view on our ability to manage the Hospira concentration risk, it would be difficult to provide certainty. Today we ask that same point of view on the underlying intrinsic value of what we are creating, and we want to be realistic on the time it will take. We think it's important to understand all these variables to make the case for long-term value-creation at ICU Medical. We've said for the last two years that we believe logic will prevail and the customers' interest will drive decision, and that has happened. Very practically, we drove returns on our own business, used our equity to solve the concentration risk, and now have a hard but very value-creating project in front of us that we need to execute on. We've illustrated the value-creation case in our base business on previous calls, even assuming declines for our Hospira business. And these quarters' results hopefully add to that evidence base. And we will eventually have control of all of our businesses to improve. As always, I'd like to close with things are moving fast. We're trying to improve the company with urgency, and we're trying to take responsible action and break some of the inertia that many companies in our position face. We may hit some bumps as we take on some of these actions, and we will overcome them and emerge stronger. I really appreciate the effort of all ICU employees and our soon-to-be colleagues from Hospira Infusion Systems to adapt move forward and focus on improving results. Lastly, our company appreciates the support we've received both from our customers and our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to Scott.