Robert Friel
Analyst · Citigroup. Your line is open
Thanks, Tommy, and good afternoon everyone. I'm pleased to report that PerkinElmer had a strong finish to 2018 with reported revenue in the fourth quarter increasing 18% over Q4 of 2017 and adjusted earnings per share growing 22%, leading both the top and bottom line of our previous guidance. Our revenue in the fourth quarter was $757 million, representing core organic growth of 7% excluding the impact from EUROIMMUN and our adjusted earnings per share was $1.18. These excellent fourth quarter results concluded the year in which we grew revenue and earnings over 20% relative to 2017, with reported revenue up 23% to $2.78 billion and adjusted earnings per share increasing 24% to $3.61. In addition, core organic growth for the full year was 7% and 8% when considering the impact of EUROIMMUN, resulting in significantly better 2018 financial results than our original guidance in January of last year. We're obviously very pleased with this performance and believe 2018 will mark an inflection point in our revenue growth, profitability, and just as importantly, our ability to make an increasingly positive impact on the quality of life across the globe. Reflecting on last year, we increased our operational execution across the Company, as the Discovery & Analytical Solutions organization has now matured its processes, leadership, and organizational structure and Diagnostics is becoming better integrated across the multiple acquisitions completed over the last few years. In addition, both businesses are experiencing excellent traction on their respective initiatives to accelerate growth beyond current levels. Clearly the portfolio and organizational changes we have made over the last few years have dramatically changed the revenue distribution of our end markets we serve, as well as our capabilities, geographic reach, and product mix. We entered 2019 with a much improved portfolio of businesses and a stronger organization that can better serve our customers, innovate breakthrough solutions, and infuse more simplicity into how we operate. Within Diagnostics, we've evolved from a business centered around the mother and child to a broader specialty Diagnostics provider due to our acquisitions of Tulip, Bioo Scientific, RHS, and EUROIMMUN, as well as breakthrough innovations now driving organic growth. As a result, we now have leading positions in reproductive health, emerging infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases and applied genomics, and have gained new technological skill sets across immuno and clinical chemistry, detection and automation, PCR, mass spec, NGS workflow and single cell genomics. Last year, we received CE-IVD marking for our Vanadis product, which we believe will dramatically increase the accessibility to noninvasive prenatal screening for many more women. The performance of EUROIMMUN continues to be strong as the business achieved mid-teens organic growth in 2018 and exceeded our plan for operating income. Also, we continue to recognize greater opportunities that benefit from end leverage, the capabilities of EUROIMMUN and PerkinElmer, as well as identifying additional synergistic opportunities in reagents, instruments and new markets. Finally, our product and services business targeted on genomics continues to expand capabilities and is experiencing strong market traction. With regards to innovation in new products, last year we generated over $67 million of incremental revenue from new product introductions, exceeding our target of $50 million and driving our vitality index from 28% to 32%. During last year, we increased our R&D spending by $47 million to 9.4% as a percentage of product revenue, up 20 basis points versus 2017. This increased spending not only resulted in incremental revenue but also enabled us to strengthen our scientific and technical capabilities in the key areas of genomics, infectious disease and digital, with most of our new R&D hires in these disciplines. Also during 2018, we continue to access disruptive technologies, executing seven key collaborations in equity investments, further accelerating innovation and access in some of our key growth areas, including reproductive health, and applied genomics, digital and pharmaceutical. In life sciences, we focused our new product introductions in the areas of imaging, reagents and software, and entered 2019 with a much more contemporary lineup of products to serve our pharmaceutical, biotech and academic customers. In addition, we continue to expand our value-added services and IT offerings across one source, bringing new tools, solutions and capabilities to our growing customers - growing base of customers. And within food analysis, we have extended our capabilities within food safety, research and quality, to address the rapidly growing demand for safe, healthy food, and credible science-backed cannabis-based products. Our broad portfolio allows us to serve as a complete food, cannabis and hemp science partner, with full lab solutions including our QSight technology. We now have over $200 million in revenue in the food segment, with cross-PKI offerings, dedicated R&D resources, and focused market specialists. Through the acquisitions of Dani Analitica and China-based Spectrum Instruments, we rapidly expanded our footprint and technical capabilities in the core market of gas chromatography. Dani has critical software and essential technology to revitalize our GC portfolio gain share across several key market segments, including ag-bio, environmental and pharma quality. The Spectrum acquisition provides a highly complementary atomic absorption product portfolio that fill the gap in the inorganic business for the high-growth China region, while also providing products directly into the local environmental, food, and industrial markets in China. Finally, we completed the divestiture of a quantitative pathology solutions business line to further streamline and focus our portfolio. Over the last three years, we executed against the well-defined strategy to shift our portfolio across markets, customers and products. As a result of these changes, we enter 2019 with over 80% of our revenue in the diagnostics, food and life science end markets, up from 50% four years ago. With the environmental and industrial end markets now representing less than 20% of our revenue versus 45% in 2014. From a geographic reach perspective, emerging markets now account for 40% of our revenue, up from 28% four years ago. Our product mix also has shifted significantly. In 2014 consumers - consumables, services and software accounted for 55% of our revenue. Today those products account for nearly 70%. For 2019, we will continue this overarching strategy to leverage our global capabilities in detection, imaging, assays and software to deliver differentiated solutions in priority end markets. As we are already driving several opportunities to deal this in specific end markets that we believe will deliver above-market growth rates. However, based on both our internal work, as well as work with external resources, we believe one of our greatest opportunities lies within the value that can be derived directly from intersections of our technologies and talent across end markets. We are clearly seeing the capabilities in applications that our customers are demanding by increasingly converging. For example, advanced pathogen-detection capabilities, usually in Diagnostics, are readily applicable to the food safety market. The same is true in other areas such as genomics, informatics and mass spec, whether based on shared technology platforms, the use of analytics, and the need for service, digital solutions or the call for integrated seamless customer experiences. Adding to this dynamic is the emerging role of artificial intelligence and machine learning for multiple uses in the life sciences, pharma, food and environmental testing, from detecting ingredient levels in crops to perfecting high-content screening. In recognition of these opportunities, we announced last month the appointment of Prahlad as President and Chief Operating Officer, to help accelerate and advance our capabilities from Diagnostics and DAS to better design, sell and service solutions in the context of our end markets. The new structure we begun to put in place will result in a more nimble focus and effective organization and we believe it poses a significant and unique advantage for PerkinElmer. With that perspective, I've asked Prahlad to discuss how he's approaching the opportunities made possible by the convergence occurring across our end markets. We see this as a powerful growth accelerator and differentiator for the Company and I'm pleased to have him lead that charge in his new expanded role. Prahlad?