Executives
Management
Linda Lennox – Senior Director-Investor Relations and Corporate Communications Jeff Bailey – President and Chief Executive Officer John Bakewell – Chief Financial Officer
Lantheus Holdings, Inc. (LNTH)
Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 4, 2015
$81.12
-2.91%
Executives
Management
Linda Lennox – Senior Director-Investor Relations and Corporate Communications Jeff Bailey – President and Chief Executive Officer John Bakewell – Chief Financial Officer
Operator
Operator
Welcome everyone to the Lantheus Medical Imaging Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2014 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. This call is being recorded for replay purposes. A replay of this call will be available approximately three hours after the conclusion of the live call through to April 1. I would now turn the call over to your host for today, Ms. Linda Lennox. Please go ahead.
Linda Lennox
Management
Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Lantheus Medical Imaging’s fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings conference call. We appreciate you joining us. I am Linda Lennox, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for Lantheus. With me on the call today are Jeff Bailey, our President and Chief Executive Officer and John Bakewell, our Chief Financial Officer. Please note that earlier this afternoon we issued a press release reporting our 2014 fourth quarter and full year results. We also filed with the SEC our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2014. You can find both of these documents in the Investor Relations section of our website at lntheus.com. The agenda for this call will include opening remarks from Jeff, a detailed review of our 2014 fourth quarter financial results from John and then a business and strategic update from Jeff along with some additional closing remarks. Please note that consistent with last quarter’s call, we are refraining from our traditional practice of conducting a question-and-answer session due to the fact that our parent company, Lantheus Holdings, Inc. remains in registration for an offering of its equity securities. Today’s prepared remarks have been expanded in order to anticipate the topics that may otherwise have been on your list of questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our remarks during this call may include some forward-looking statements including statements related to our products and supply arrangements and expectations for future periods. Matters addressed in these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Words such as believes, expects, anticipates, hopes, plans, may and similar expressions are intended to identify such statements. Actual results may differ materially from our expectations. Please refer to the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC today March 4, 2015. A copy may be obtained at sec.gov and on our website at lantheus.com. Except to the extent required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements and we caution you against relying on any forward-looking statements. On today’s call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures with respect to our performance. We use these non-GAAP indicators for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate our performance. The definitions of EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA and net income as adjusted along with their reconciliation to GAAP net income are set forth in our earnings release, which was filed with the SEC as of March 4, 2015 as a current report on Form 8-K. Copies may be obtained at sec.gov and on our website at lantheus.com. Please note that unless we indicate otherwise, all of our commentary on today’s call will make reference to as adjusted results. With that introduction, it is now my pleasure to turn the call over to our CEO, Jeff Bailey. Jeff?
Jeff Bailey
President
Thank you, Linda. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings call. I will start today’s discussion with some opening commentary before handing the call over to John for his financial review. I’m pleased to report that we had a very good quarter and a strong year overall. We continue to advance our business on a number of different fronts during 2014, especially operationally and financially. The improvement in our financial performance was evident across our entire P&L. Beginning with our revenues which grew during the full year 2014 outpacing 2013 by 6% on an as-reported basis and 8% in constant currency. DEFINITY, our flagship product was the largest contributor to our strong revenue growth, posting a 23% increase year-over-year. Toward sustained focus on quality, efficiency and customer service we continue to drive operational efficiencies in 2014 with along with favorable sales mix contributions increased our full year gross margin nearly 900 basis points on an adjusted basis to 41.6%, within an additional 750 basis points improving from the operating expense leverage. Our net income as adjusted was positive on the full year basis at $41,000 for 2014. This compares to a net loss as adjusted for 2013 totaling $48.7 million. Some of our progress is reflected in our adjusted EBITDA results, which increased by 84%, year-over-year to $70.8 million for the full year 2014. We are very pleased with the continued success of our transformation efforts throughout the year and the financial results we produced for 2014. At this time I’ll hand the call over to John for a detailed review of our fourth quarter financial results. After which I’ll be back to take you through a more extensive business update and review of our strategic priorities. With that, John, it’s all yours.
John Bakewell
Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. As Jeff, noted we are quite pleased with our latest results and I’m happy to be taking you through the details. I will be taking you through the specifics of our Q4 performance and then wrap up with a high level summary of our full year performance before Jeff provides his business update. Before I begin, let me first note that today’s press release provides you with our P&L results in accordance to GAAP requirements and also includes tables which provide reconciliations of certain of our P&L components from an as reported GAAP basis to one that is adjusted to exclude the impact of certain special charges and credits. Those adjustments include the current year costs associated with the initiatives we announced in November to consolidate our corporate campus. And prior year impacts related to intangible write-downs a land sale and a special recovery from manufacturer. We will also provide a similar table with a reconciliation of our reported GAAP P&L results to EBITDA and also to adjusted EBITDA. We recognize that most of you evaluate our performance on one more of these bases but exclude certain non cash expenses as well as other special items. And we provided you with all the information necessary for you to model our results accordingly. The full year results, that Jeff just shared, refer to these as adjusted presentations and unless noted otherwise [indiscernible] with the commentary I’ll be providing on Q4. So, with that, let’s move into our discussion of Q4 results. Fourth quarter 2014 revenue totaled $77 million increasing year-over-year a 7% as reported and 9% on a constant-currency basis. That I’ll cover in more detail when we review of revenue performance consistent with what we’ve been experiencing all year. The product lines that drove…
Jeff Bailey
President
Thank you, John. [indiscernible] review let me start with DEFINITY and a year had. As I noted earlier, year-over-year sales at DEFINITY grew more than 22% and sequential quarterly sales grew by 6%. DEFINITY is our largest product, accounting for 33% of our total revenue. In addition to be in our fastest growing commercial product is also our highest margin product. And with sales continuing to grow each quarter, we expect contribution to our gross profit to increase. A critical strategy for the continued growth of DEFINITY is expanding, the appropriate use of contrast. Our nationwide sales force, which is solely dedicated to DEFINITY works diligently every day to show clinicians the benefits of the appropriate use of contrast, which include improvement and in image quality and reduced number of suboptimal echo studies and potentially better patient management a lower downstream healthcare cost. The true contrast [ph] penetration rate, which is the percentage of all U.S. echocardiography studies performed with an imaging agent of any time, has performed significantly over the last couple of years. We exited 2014 for the three-month average, U.S. contrast penetration rate of 4.1%, and all time high since the launch of DEFINITY in 2001 and by growing by 24% or 80 basis points from the markets 2013 exit rate of 3.2%. Even with this significant year-over-year growth and a contrast penetration rate, the U.S. ultrasound contrast market is still significantly under penetrated continually 4.1% at echo is currently get contrast, even though 20% or more are considered suboptimal. With our continued efforts in 2015, to raise awareness about the benefits of ultrasound contrast and we expected additional voice in the marketplace we believe the contrast penetration rate will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned on our third quarter call the FDA…