Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for starting by. I'm Patrick Wright, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining QIAGEN's conference call to discuss results for the fourth quarter and full year 2014. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that this call is being recorded at QIAGEN's request and will be made available on the Internet site. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to introduce your host, John Gilardi, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at QIAGEN. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Hello. Welcome to our conference call today in which we like to prepare -- have some prepared remarks as well as time for Q&A session. Our speakers today are Peer Schatz, the CEO of QIAGEN; and Roland Sackers, our Chief Financial Officer. On Slide 2, you will see the customary disclaimer explaining that the discussion and responses to your questions on this call reflect management's view as of today, January 29, 2015. We will be making statements and providing responses to your questions that state our intentions, beliefs, expectations and predictions for the future. And these constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the safe harbor provisions. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. QIAGEN disclaims any intention or obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I would like to now hand over to Peer.

Thank you, John. Hello, and welcome to our call today to discuss results for 2014 and the fourth quarter and also to provide our perspectives and goals for 2015. I have a few messages for you as an overview. The first, we delivered solid results for 2014, driven by the continued strong performance of our growth drivers. Our teams made important progress on the transformation of QIAGEN. As for 2015, we're determined to build momentum behind our core portfolio, especially the growth drivers that are now providing about 30% of our sales as we work through the final year of significant U.S. HPV headwinds. In terms of the results, they were in line with our preannouncement on January 11. As you saw in the press release on Wednesday, adjusted net sales rose 4% at constant exchange rates in the fourth quarter of 2014. That was the same rate for the full year and both were in line with our communicated targets. Most important, sales rose 9% for the year when excluding U.S. HPV products and now providing about 95% of total sales. In terms of earnings, adjusted EPS was $1 per share for the year. This included $0.08 of mainly noncash restructuring charges for technology-related impairments. And so that means to achieve our guidance $1.08 before the charges. When looking at the adjusted EPS trends in recent years, keep in mind that we changed our adjustment policy as of the first quarter of 2014, so a year ago, involving share-based compensation and restructuring charges, and on a like-for-like basis, we have seen a solid increase. We also had strong free cash flow of $201 million for the year, which was up 15% from 2013. Second, we are moving ahead on initiatives to accelerate innovation and growth from our core portfolio,…

Thank you, Peer. Good afternoon to everyone in Europe, and good morning to those joining from the U.S. I'm now on Slide 8 and would like to review the results in more detail. In terms of adjusted net sales, we delivered 4% growth at constant exchange rates for both the fourth quarter and the full year, but we saw diverging trends in terms of the currency impact. For the full year, we had an adverse impact of about 1 percentage point, but this became much more pronounced in the fourth quarter with an impact of about 4 percentage points as the dollar strengthened considerably against a number of currencies compared to the fourth quarter of 2013. Sales growth for the year was evenly split between contributions from the bioinformatics acquisitions and the rest of the business. For the fourth quarter, this split was 1 point from acquisitions and 3 from the rest of our portfolio. The Enzymatics acquisition was completed in December so very little for 2014. As you saw in our preannouncement following the Enzymatics acquisition, we decided to take $22 million of business integration acquisition-related charges in the fourth quarter of 2014 and of which about $18 million were noncash charges. These charges included closing our Gaithersburg, Maryland site as we build up activities in the Boston area. And in line with our policy, these charges were excluded from adjusted results. At the same time, we also decided to take a restructuring charge of USD 25.5 million, of which about $20 million were noncash items. These charges mainly involve the impairment of technology-related assets. In line with our new policy, these restructuring charges were not excluded from adjusted results. As a result, adjusted operating income declined 2% for the year and adjusted operating income margin declined to 23.2%…

Yes. Thank you, Roland. I'm now on Slide 11 to review the progress of our growth drivers in 2014 and some of the goals we have set for 2015. On the QIAsymphony automation platform, we have delivered more than 250 new placements in 2014, which put us well over the 1,250 cumulative placements at the end of the year, making one of the most widely placed systems for medium-throughput molecular processing. A key driver is the expanding menu, with the addition of 8 tests in 2014 in the United States and/or Europe on the Rotor-Gene Q, the PCR component of this workflow. We've set a new goal to exceed 1,500 cumulative placements at the end of 2015 as well. On Personalized Healthcare, which generated more than $100 million of sales, we had big achievements in expanding our portfolio of partnerships as well as expanding our portfolio to span PCR next-generation sequencing and Modaplex technologies and also in the area of liquid biopsies. Earlier this month, we announced the first-ever regulated CE-IVD for a liquid biopsy companion diagnostic in lung cancer, and this was with AstraZeneca and their targeted therapy, IRESSA. We also completed a U.S. submission for a companion diagnostic paired with IRESSA in 2014. Our status as the preferred partner for these codevelopment agreements was solidified with the announcement in November of a new agreement with Novartis, which marks the ninth of these master collaboration agreements and comes after the Astellas agreement earlier in 2014. We're working on a number of potential commissions for 2015, but these depend upon the Pharma partner pipelines. Moving to QuantiFERON, this product exceeded $100 million of sales for the first time in 2014. We are maintaining our target for 20% constant exchange rate growth in 2015, and the recent launch of the CE-IVD…

Thank you, Peer. I'm now on Slide 16 to provide some comments on our guidance for 2015 and also for the first quarter. As we mentioned on the call for our third quarter results in October, we're expecting sales growth in 2015 of about 4% at constant exchange rates. This is based on generating about 7 to 8 percentage points of constant exchange rate growth from our core portfolio, which represented about 95% of sales in 2014, against the final year of significant headwinds from our U.S. HPV products. We have taken a conservative view with our expectations for about 3 to 4 percentage points of headwinds for the year. For adjusted EPS, we are expecting about $1.16 to $1.18 per share on a full year basis at constant exchange rates. These expectations take into account that we announced earlier in January about Enzymatics acquisitions, and that is for about $20 million of incremental sales in 2015. The adjusted EPS guidance also takes a largely neutral view on the 2024 notes repurchase impact since there are some onetime tax charges, but accretion benefits are expected in 2016. Moving to Slide 17. Here, you see an overview of our guidance for the full year and the first quarter. As I just mentioned, our guidance is for adjusted net sales to rise about 4% at constant exchange rates for the year. And this takes into account our views on the final year of U.S. HPV headwinds, which will be more pronounced in the first half of 2015 than in the second half. For the first quarter, our guidance is for about 2% constant exchange rate growth and this takes into account about 7 to 8 percentage points of constant exchange rate growth from our portfolio against about 5 to 6 percentage points…

Yes, thank you, Roland. I'm now on Slide 18 for a quick summary before we move into Q&A. So let me review what we have announced. First, we delivered a solid performance in 2014, moving ahead on initiatives to accelerate innovation and growth with adjusted net sales of 9% on a constant exchange rate basis when excluding headwinds from the U.S. HPV franchise. Adjusted EPS was impacted by the restructuring charge, which was mainly noncash, while we had a nice increase in free cash flow. Second, we made a lot of progress in 2014 towards transforming on the QIAGEN portfolio. The benefits of these efforts will become more apparent through the course of 2015 as -- also, as we work through the final year of U.S. HPV headwinds and deliver above-market growth from the core portfolio. Third, our guidance is for higher adjusted net sales and EPS at constant exchange rates. And as a last point, we will continue our approach to disciplined capital allocation with a combination of targeted acquisitions that strengthen our portfolio and share repurchases. With that, I'd like to hand back to the operator to open the Q&A session. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of that Dan Leonard of Leerink.

Question for Roland. Roland, I know there's a lot of moving pieces in 2015 with foreign currency. But I'm trying to determine what is your underlying EBIT expansion assumption in the 2015 guidance. And what are the sources of the expansion?

Excellent question. So for -- also for 2015, we feel quite comfortable that we're able to expand our overall adjusted EBIT margin by roughly 100 basis points, excluding currency. We do believe that, as you just said, currency gives us at least a certain headwind so that might be somewhere, again using more or less today's rate, 30 to 40 basis points headwind. So it still leaves us still with a quite significant net improvement potential here. And again, it's our assumption, what we have delivered in 2014. So we feel quite comfortable, as clearly, the efficiency programs we finalized over the course of '13 and '14 are gaining traction. So most of the impact comes out of SG&A, to a certain extent on the R&D side, as some of the larger programs we are able -- we will be able to finalize over the course of '15. So all in, I guess, that gives us, as I said, net 60 to 70 basis points for adjusted EBIT.

And our next question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson of JPMorgan. Tycho W. Peterson - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Wondering, maybe Peer, if you can put some parameters around kind of the market opportunity and your view around – to the growth drivers, in particular. Liquid biopsy, obviously, you had progress with ERISA out of the gate, but talk to how big you think this market opportunity is and what may be that could contribute in '15. And then similarly, with the QuantiFERON Monitor, you talked about $100 million market but obviously potential to expand that. What's the time frame to move beyond the initial focus on transplant?

Tycho, the first, the -- well, start with the second one first. The QuantiFERON Monitor is going to first be positioned in the transplant market, which is a big market that we're already very well-positioned in, and that is also shown on this -- on the slide that we showed. We have a very strong franchise in transplantation testing, which was further reaffirmed by the 510(k) we got in HSV, which in addition to CMV which has a PMA and HSV now added as a 510(k), we have the other assays as ASRs available or moving to the pipeline. And with QuantiFERON Monitor, the QuantiFERON CMV assay, which is already available in Europe and QuantiFERON TB, which is also used in transplantation, we have a very, very interesting portfolio there. So we think that transplantation market, which overall is maybe $100 million in size, is a very good starting point for QuantiFERON Monitor. But as we now are further validating in some programs, also together with pharma companies, things like the use of this QuantiFERON Monitor assay as a companion diagnostic with immuno oncology drugs, PD-1, PD-L1 portfolio, there's a really interesting opportunity there because we can assess appropriate dosage of these drugs, which is obviously extremely important in immuno oncology and other areas. But this still is in validation mode so we wouldn't want to put a timing behind it at this point. But over the course of '15, you'll definitely get a lot more news flow in that regard. In terms of the liquid biopsy portfolio, there are a number of different terms floating around in the market what this actually is. There 2 ways of describing it. One is the use of liquid biopsy as a sample, the sample technologies. And this is an area that we've…

Our next question comes from the line of Jack Meehan of Barclays.

I just wanted to get your latest thoughts on guidelines relating to TB testing with the World Health Organization. And then whether you had any reason to believe that the blood-based test could take more meaningful share from the skin test, if you saw greater adoption there.

Absolutely there -- the guidelines are changing around the world, and we definitely saw a number of new guideline changes in a number of different segments also in the United States, all calling for a more stringent, more structured latent TB testing process. And there, our product really excels because one of the biggest issues with latent TB is that the old skin test requires multiple visits and has a lot of false positives, especially also due to vaccinated populations being picked up as positives. And so the simplicity of our product and the lowering of the administration cost leads to very substantial savings to the health care system and also to systems like the correctional facilities, immigration and others. So we see that the benefits that we've been able to create with the latent TB product, the QuantiFERON Gold product, have been right on spot in terms of now everything the guidelines are calling for. And we think that the new products, and this is actually a very substantial new product that we launched, the TB Gold Plus product, has the ability to also now differentiate between risk of progression to active TB. And this is still in validation mode, but we're working very actively on it. So there are a lot of new features in this new product that up and beyond the current usage could provide new applications as well. We remain enthusiastic about the opportunity, and all of the guideline changes are moving in the right direction for us. I'd just also like to highlight the WHO guidelines for use of these -- of latent TB testing in even higher-prevalence countries and risk populations. And this is just massive in terms of increasing the total available market. We always talk about 50 million to 60 million tests. We believe that alone added a double-digit million dollar of total available market in terms of tests to that. And we're obviously working very hard to be able to translate that into numbers. So growth trajectory for many years to come, we see very positive on this product portfolio.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Bardo of Berenberg Bank.

I have a few financial questions, please. Mainly just focusing initially on cash flow development. I think a couple of years ago at your Capital Markets Day, you outlined an ambition to double your operating cash flow in the midterm. And really, the question just relates to why operating cash flow hasn't grown as rapidly as your reported net income, given actually last year, you had a lot of cash restructuring cost, lesser than this year. So just a little bit of clarification around that. And if possible, a operating cash flow guidance for 2015 would be very helpful.

Yes, Scott. In terms for 2015, we clearly do believe that we should be able to increase both of the -- compared to, both meaning free cash flow as well as operating cash flow faster than the net income, driven by the benefits out of our efficiency programs. And if you look into 2014, again, you could see that we were able to raise free cash flow to actually a record USD 201 million for the full year. This also includes, as we just said as well, certain payouts from restructuring accruals. So again, there are clearly certain things in which shouldn't be in, especially in '15 and beyond. Probably more important also, there is a certain swing now actually more from the fourth quarter in 2014 into the first quarter 2015, driven by certain hedging in derivatives we did. So again, I would say that Q4 cash flow is actually underrepresented, where probably Q1 2015 cash flow will be slightly overrepresented. At the end of the day, we feel on track with being able to, as we said before, doubling our operating cash flow in the course of 3 to 4 years. The 15% we have seen in '15 gives us here actually a good jump start.

And our next question comes from the line of Vijay Kumar of Evercore ISI.

Peer, maybe I had a different take on your instrument versus consumables. Fairly strong uptake in your instrument placements, double-digits, right? And I guess my question is what percentage of those are incremental new placements versus replacing existing systems? I guess because the read-through is at some point, that has to translate into a stronger consumable growth. And so I guess how should we sort of model our consumable growth, just given the strong instrument placements that you had this year?

So indeed, the instrument placements are leading to very strong growth in consumables, high double-digit growth in consumables in accounts where we place a system. The -- by far, the majority of these placements are with new accounts. We only have few of the systems that are replacing older systems. Remember, the QIAsymphony is basically a clinical sample to insight solution and integrates with real-time PCR next-generation sequencing. A big chunk is actually doing next-gen sequencing also on the downstream as well. So we're really placing into a lot of virgin territory and are not seeing a lot of replacement demand. It's tough to estimate this because the systems are rarely retired at this stage. They're very long lifespans that they can work on. Some of our instruments have been running for 20 years or so. But I would estimate that at least 85% are new placements and 15% are recurring. The installed base is clearly moving up on the Symphony side, but also products like QIAcube, where we have more than double-digit thousand systems out there, and we have very large -- these are products that by far the most of them are currently being sold as new placements or additional placements and rarely retiring old systems. So we're still in an early phase of the instrument rollout, as we said. And in the U.S., it really just started because the menu has been starting to come together, and I showed you transplant is really, since January now, we have the critical mass together, and we can rollout a very interesting portfolio into that attractive market.

And our next question comes from the line of Brian Weinstein of William Blair. Brian Weinstein - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division: Peer, maybe we can just continue in the kind of theme there on the QIAsymphony a little. Can you update us on utilization and where that stands now that you've launched a number of assays in the U.S.? So can you give us kind of where things stand in the U.S. but also in the kind of an update on utilization o U.S.?

Right. Sure, so 2014 was definitely a year of migration where we had the C. diff assay, which is obviously a very low-hanging fruit assay, pushed the whole system through an FDA clearance about 9 months ago. The portfolio obviously is not complete with one assay. And we have other assays in the pipeline, the whole HAI portfolio and the Women's Health portfolio as well -- the transplant portfolio, I mean. So there's -- the transplant portfolio has now been coming together. We got the PMA on CMV. We got the 510(k) on HSV, and those are the bigger volume assays and the rest we have available as ASRs. And the -- so there, we're starting to see now the portfolio come together nicely. The 2015 submissions will include the QuantiFERON Monitor, which we think is truly novel and a completely new message to transplantation experts and potentially also the CMV monitor assay, which we think is very novel but a smaller opportunity. So the transplant were coming together nicely, which means that we can move into this $100 million market quite aggressively. On HAI, we are in the process of working through these submissions and the clin trials, and so we'll see a string of announcements in '15 around that. For each of these -- once we have the critical mass in the menu, the markets open up, and this is just now starting to happen.

And our next question comes from the line of Derik De Bruin of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

So, Peer, can you just give us -- I jumped on the call late, so my apologies if you addressed this already, but your Informatics business, how big is that sort of exiting 2014? And could you just give us some idea on what is sort of embedded into your growth expectations on that business for '15? And I guess my question is like what is sort of additional things you're doing to sort of expand that? And I've got a follow-up to that.

Sure. So our bioinformatics franchise is uniquely focused on everything that is extremely close to the biology. So we would not enter into markets that we think are potentially better served by large IT companies or others. But this biology proximity is an area that is growing quite rapidly, and we have today a revenue base, which is 3%, 4% of our sales base. We have a very strong double-digit growth expectation in that area for '15, '16. The trajectory is certainly attractive on the stand-alone basis, but it's obviously a smaller part of our business. The key thing is that we are seeing everything that we do across the company having some sort of a smart angle, as we see the industry is moving from selling cell phones to smart phones where we are trying to integrate this intelligence into even the most standard products that we sell and trying to link them up to the intelligence that we can help create through the bioinformatics franchises that we have. So you're going to see a lot of that become a lot more evident over the course of 2015. So the business itself is a very good trajectory. It's been a very attractive value creative for us going forward, but at the same time, it has an impact across our organization.

Our next question comes from the line of Barak Khurshid (sic) [Zarak Khurshid] of Wedbush Securities.

So I guess first, for the codevelopment payments, how should we be thinking about the pacing of those and the magnitude and call it organic growth, say '15 and beyond?

Sure. So if you look at our Personalized Healthcare franchise, which we scoped at a little bit over $100 million in sales or over $100 million in sales, the codevelopment payments, they're a fluctuating percentage, but the more important part of the value that we generate here comes from kit sales, and that is obviously attractive area for us. And many of these companion diagnostic and cancer kits are growing at very, very solid double-digit growth rates. The payments we're getting from pharmaceutical companies, we typically have a large number that is being committed to by pharmaceutical companies. We assume a certain attrition number and that is what we then ultimately put into our base for the year 2015 and also resource against. And the number can increase, but very frankly, we're less focused on the growth in that area. We're more focused on making sure that we have the highest possible number of kits actually making it over the finish line. So a lot of our time is actually spent in evaluating pharmaceutical companion diagnostic opportunities as to their likelihood of actually achieving success in creating a sizable market opportunity for kits. And this -- so we would rather turn down a program than take one on board and potentially crowd out something more interesting just to get a short term maybe revenue gain through higher codevelopment payments. So I wouldn't assume big growth on that percentage. We said a couple of years ago it's about 1/3 of the portfolio that just assume that it's not a dramatically changing number going forward to have a steady increase of the menu is going to, by itself, lead to a significant growth on the kit sales like we're already experiencing.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Areith (sic) [Dan Arias] of Citigroup.

Peer, on the HPV business, it sounds like you expect the revenue headwind to progressively decline over the course of the year. Is that just based on comps and the fact that the percentage of total sales is going to go down? Or is there a specific pricing or account element that you expect to play a role there?

Sure. So HPV was about 4% -- U.S. HPV was about 4% of sales in the fourth quarter of 2015. And by the way, this is why you see -- if we now assume that there's continued headwind, you see that by the end of '15, this should probably not be a meaningful impact anymore. This is why we expect that the headwinds dissipate and the underlying leading organic growth that we are currently experiencing will shine through. The majority of this is actually pricing, and we're basically rolling over contracts into these new prices as the contracts expire. We're actually very successful in being able to roll them over, but prices have come down, as we all know, from about $20 that we had about 4, 5 years ago on average to where they are today in the single digits. And this simply had to do with irrational pricing behavior by some entrants. So we're following that. We are helping our customers also transition and being able to justify this type of testing, but it clearly came at the expense of revenue. These contracts are starting to -- the rollover is now starting to near completion, and this is what we hope to happen at the end of '15, and we're not far away from that though.

Our next question comes from the line of Daniel Wendorff of Commerzbank.

I have a question regarding your bioinformatics product offering. Can you potentially put that into a competitive perspective, how big is your next competitor? And if -- how complete is your offering basically versus your competition? And where do you still see gaps?

Thanks, Daniel. This is -- so the portfolio that we have today is the industry-leading portfolio in interpretation. So I think we can say in all fairness that in interpreting PCR next-generation sequencing data, we're really second to none. And this shows by the market shares and the sizes that we have. We are, many times, even a lot larger than the #2 in this space, and in terms of quality, we believe far ahead. This has been a 15-year effort with massive resources, and the result is just starting to show its true value. So there's a clear industry-leading position that we're now putting into a very strong reporting capability. So the ability to create really slick, really simple reports for pathologists and even physicians is well underway. And we've already demoed it to some people, have seen it already, and this, we think, will be a great and exciting 2015 launch. The second is on the secondary analysis, meaning, take the data -- taking the data off the sequence and putting it into, I'm calling, the variance. There, we have a very strong offering in the commercial arena. Also here, several times larger than the #2 in the market with the CLC branded product portfolio. This has been an undisputed leader in next-generation sequencing. We have now ported it over to clinical uses. The cancer research workbench, for instance, is an intermediary step in that direction. And we've now integrated also the BIOBASE portfolio into that workbench. And some of you might've seen that this is incredibly slick. If you look at how we can actually take data off sequencers and seamlessly move them through with just a few buttons to be pushed into a report that can be used by physicians, by pathologists. This is incredible. Today's systems require an extensive training in bioinformatics, and this is just not going to help democratization, especially in clinical research and diagnosis, and that's where we have a good offering. So we have a good and complete offering in this space, along that pipe, but we're continuing to expand it incrementally. For us, the key thing is, again, we will not go into areas that we think are better served by big data companies. There a lot of areas of bioinformatics that we think other companies can serve at least as well, and those are less attractive for us. But we're going to stay very close to the biology and very close to the wet lab features of it. And that -- that's where our core domain is and the rest of the areas we partner. As you know, we have a strong partnership with IBM and with other companies in this area, and we'll continue to expand these relationships with them and others.

And our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel of Cowen and Company.

I guess 3 clean up questions. First, on the pharmaceutical end market. Your growth's been improving the last few quarters, but relative to some other life science tools providers, it's been a little bit late relatively speaking. Just wondering if you'd be willing to talk about why you think that might be. My second question is also on pharmaceuticals. Did you see a spike in pharmaceutical milestone payments in Q4, given some of the companion diagnostic announcements you made towards the end of the quarter? And my third question is on HPV. Given if we kind of look at the pacing over the course of 2014, you went from about $30 million in U.S. HPV revenue in Q1, down to something that was probably between $10 million to $15 million in Q4. I know you talked about pricing, but it seems like when you see this type of drop in a market where the competitors have been there for little bit, that there's probably some contracts that are rolling off. Is the assumption that there's more of those rolling off next year? And should we model it accordingly?

Sure. Thanks, Doug, I'll take 1 in 3 and Roland can take 2. So the first on the pharma side. Pharma is a very different or is very diverse group of customers. We've seen a good uptick in some regions. We've seen very poor performance in others. And it really depends on where larger projects are being done, especially in clinical development. So it's much more lumpy than, for instance, Academia. And I wouldn't interpret too much into a quarter-over-quarter, sequential quarter performance. Look at this more in annual performance where there are improving trends. What I would say is that on the Pharma side, we're not super satisfied in how we've been able to address that market, and that's something that we're addressing for 2015, has to do with the way that our commercial engine was set up, and we are looking at this in a new way. So this is something where we think we can improve further on this. But again, the sequential performance, I wouldn't put too much interpretation into it. The second thing is on the HPV side. The contracts are simply rolling over and then they're renewed at new prices, and that will continue over the course of 2015, as the guidance already implicates. Our underlying growth rate is in the high single digits, and we're seeing the headwind, and we will also see that over the course -- in particular, over the first 3 quarters of this year. But we expect, based on how contracts are structured and what still is up for renewal, that we will see the majority of that having rolled out by the end of the year. Again going from 4% of sales in Q4 2014, this -- you'll see where this will potentially end up. So we're already assuming a rather aggressive continuation of this trend into a number that will not impact us anymore going forward, thereafter. And that, again, will be sometime the second half of the year.

And on your question around -- results of companion diagnostic, as we said before, we particularly had a very strong fourth quarter. Please have in mind that we do report that within our MDx numbers and the growth rate ex HPV for MDx was 16%, excluding currency impact in the fourth quarter. So again, also very strong performance. It's driven actually by both, a good kit sales performance. We see improving trends not only in U.S. but also globally. At the same time, with the number of new contracts we've been able to close, we had a good finish in the fourth quarter, clearly also one of the driver for 2015 as well.

And our last question for today comes from the line of Jeff Elliott of Robert Baird. Jeffrey T. Elliott - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division: Quick follow-up for Roland and then a question for Peer. Roland, on the operating margin expansion commentary from earlier, were you adjusting for the fourth quarter charges in the year-over-year improvement? And then...

Yes, absolutely. Jeffrey T. Elliott - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division: Peer, a question on the appetite for M&A. Are there specific areas you're looking for with a net leverage at 1.5 turns, it's pretty low. I guess, what -- how big could you go in other areas that you're interested in?

Before you answer question, just to make it very clear, so I was more or less commentating on adjusted balances also for 2014. So my basis was 25.1% for 2014.

Great. Yes, so I think there's a theoretical question, Jeff. And answer to that question, which we all can calculate with a theoretical fire power, is the company's extremely well-financed, has a strong balance sheet, and we are obviously reallocating capital to our shareholders quite aggressively as you see. You saw the bond repurchase and the share repurchase last year. And that said, we are aggressively also looking at acquisition opportunities in an environment like this, and we see a lot of opportunities, especially for a company our size where a lot of entities are attractive even to a certain degree needle-moving transactions on our scale, but less so for larger entities. So we have been quite successful. You saw the Enzymatics transaction. We're very excited about that. We're very excited about BIOBASE. So we've been very selective. And if you look at the last 3, 4 years, we are very pleased with the performance of that track record. It added a phenomenal asset base and also value creation in the meantime to our entity, and we expect that to continue. And by the way, this value creation was across Life Sciences and Diagnostics. So the capital allocation has been very balanced, and we look at opportunities and not simply at market segments.

So with that, I'd like to close the conference call. And if you have any following questions, please do not hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an e-mail. Thank you again.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.