Robert F. Friel
Analyst · Paul Knight, CLSA
Thanks, Tommy. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. As many of you may have seen in our earnings release, in the first quarter this year, we experienced a 1% decline in revenue, following 12 consecutive quarters of greater than 3% organic growth. This lower-than-expected revenue, combined with our previously communicated growth and productivity investments, resulted in lower operating profit, and consequently, adjusted EPS was lower than both our forecast in Q1 of last year. During today's call, I will summarize what caused our top line miss, how it impacted our financial performance this quarter, as well as what we expect for the rest of the year. In addition, I will discuss several of the qualitative accomplishments this quarter. Turning first to our revenue in the quarter. 85% of our product lines performed as we expected and grew quite well during the first quarter. Our shortfall in the quarter was almost exclusively due to 3 distinct parts of our business that together represent about 15% of our revenue. While a small portion of our business, the magnitude of the decline in these areas drove the overall 1% organic revenue decline. The first of these areas was our environmental instrument business in Western Europe, which declined midteens versus our expectation of low single-digit declines. While the revenue declines were fairly broad-based and not restricted to any one country, from an end market perspective, the most significant headwinds were felt in the industrial end markets. As some of you may recall, at the beginning of 2012, we were quite bearish on macroeconomic conditions in Western Europe and planned accordingly. Despite the difficult operating environment in 2012, we were able to significantly exceed our projections in both Q1 and Q2. Although we remain cautious this year, conditions proved to be more challenging than we had anticipated. The second area of unanticipated weakness was in Japan. Japan represents about 5% of our revenue and has recently been growing high single digits. In fact, I was there at the end of 2012 attending a large customer event and did not detect any concern for funding or reduction in demand. Our forecast assumed a slight decline in Japan in the first quarter due to difficult year-over-year comparisons, resulting from strong sales of our radiometric detection instruments generated from the disaster response in 2011 and early 2012. However, our actual results declined over 25%. Lags in government funding resulted from the delay of supplementary budget approval, along with the lower yen and a general cautionary spending environment, impacted not only our radiometric detection business but the majority of our product offerings across the portfolio in Japan. The third factor impacting this quarter's financial performance was a significant decline in our in vivo imaging business, a product line that has a been historically long strong performer, generating midteens growth, and one which we believe we have very strong market share. As a portion of this business that's exposed through academic funding in the U.S., we assumed its growth would moderate to mid-single digits in the early part of this year, due to concerns over sequestration. However, this business was also down more than 25% in the quarter as delays in funding for academic laboratories brought on by austerity concerns were more severe not only in the United States but internationally as well. Due to the significant costs in our in vivo instruments and our strong share in this business, we generally have a strong indication of which customers will purchase and when purchase orders will be received. Going into March, we believed that we had good line of sight to achieve our in vivo forecast. Unfortunately, the majority of our deal pipeline was pushed out due to a number of reasons, which fundamentally centered on concerns over the uncertainty of future funding. Fortunately, we do not believe any of these deals were lost and believe most of the projected first quarter orders will result in future purchases. Before discussing our adjusted operating profit, I would like to briefly touch on the remaining 85% of our business, which as I mentioned previously, performed quite well and continues to generate very good growth. Our Diagnostic business grew mid-single digits and with contributions for both screening and medical imaging. Our screening business experienced good growth across every product area and geography, and with the newborn area growing double digits and our business in China continue to expand over 20%. Also, of note this quarter, was that based on our newborn screening data that appears that birth rates in the U.S. have increased almost 3% in the last 12 months. In the Medical Imaging business, despite difficult year-over-year comparisons, we continued to grow mid-single digits, and in fact, shipped the largest number of panels in the history of the business. Turning to our research business. We experienced good growth in those areas, where we have prioritized our investments, including sample prep for next-gen sequencing and reagents for the biotherapeutic area and High Content Screening. And our informatics business continues to perform well, growing over 20% in the quarter. Finally, in the environmental business, while our instruments have come under pressure, as I mentioned previously, particularly in Europe and Japan, the service business continues to grow, expanding mid-single digits as we win new customers with our comprehensive OneSource program. Turning now to operating income. When we issued guidance, we discussed our plans to use the incremental profit from our planned growth in the first quarter of the year to complete several productivity projects, as well as fuel incremental growth investments. Therefore, we guided to minimal adjusted operating margin expansion in the first half of this year. Since our revenue actually declined slightly in the quarter rather than increase, we, obviously, did not generate any incremental profit from the higher revenue. And as a result, our incremental costs have resulted in lower operating margins year-over-year. In addition, as our revenue shortfall did not become apparent until very late in the quarter, we did not have an opportunity to offset the revenue miss. Furthermore, much of the revenue that experienced the unexpected contraction carries some of our highest gross margins, which further compounded the profit delta and resulted in a very high percentage of the revenue miss flowing through to the bottom line. And for the remainder of the year, we've reforecasted both the top and bottom line assumptions to reflect more modest revenue growth, particularly in the short term. Specifically, we are assuming our demand profile in Q2 is similar to Q1, with Europe and Japan continuing to be challenging. However, we believe our in vivo imaging business will return to positive organic growth this quarter. As we move into the second half of this year, we believe the severity of the headwinds will moderate, and we will return to an organic growth rate more similar to what we had in plan, albeit probably at the lower end of our original forecast. Consequently, we now believe that for the full year, we will grow organically in low single digits as compared to mid-single digits communicated in January. In an effort to offset some of the profit miss from the lower revenue forecast, we will be both moderating our investment plans for the remainder of the year, as well as pursuing additional prudent cost actions and accelerating some previously planned productivity actions. However, given that the large bulk of our business continues to perform as planned and are in attractive growth markets, we believe it is important to maintain the appropriate balance between investing in growth and disciplined cost management. While Andy will cover the specifics of the guidance, overall, we believe Q2 will be another difficult quarter, where our financial results will be below last year. However, we believe that through actions we plan to take in Q2, and some recovery in the impacted areas, the adjusted operating income and adjusted EPS for the second half of the year to be close to our original guidance. Before turning the call over to Andy to cover our financial results in more detail, I would like to quickly highlight some of the areas where we made good progress in the quarter against our management priorities for the year. First of all, in the quarter, we continued to make strong headway on rationalizing our production footprint and are on target to transfer manufacturing several product lines to lower-cost regions by the end of June. We are accelerating our efforts to expand our global reach, most recently through opening of our new South African office. And we are in the process of growing our direct presence in other expanding economies such as Turkey, Israel and Vietnam. This quarter, we continued our efforts through developing the next generation of screening assays for genetic diseases such as SCIDS, which we discussed last quarter, and have now deployed, as well as Fragile X, a genetic disease that can result in mental retardation and neuro degeneration. This assay has already been successful with our collaborators in Hong Kong, and we look forward to expanding use later this year. Additionally, our recently introduced Spectrum Two infrared spectrometer instrument has been introduced in the air monitoring, food analysis, oil analysis and a wide array of applications within customers that meet expanding needs in measuring contamination in the world around us. We also continue to expand our prenatal and informatics capabilities in the quarter, and we are pleased to announce the expansion of our contract with Aetna to include an IPT screening. Aetna's approximately 20 million covered patients will now have access to Verinata Health's verify prenatal test, helping to accelerate the broader adoption of noninvasive prenatal testing. Now let me turn the call over to Andy, and then we'll open the call to your questions.