Walter Rosebrough
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks Mark, and good morning everyone. We are now three quarters of the way through our year and have delivered constant currency organic revenue growth at the high-end of our expectations growing 5% year-to-date and are on track for another year of record earnings. Looking across our portfolio, we have high single-digit or low double-digit revenue growth across the majority of our businesses driven by solid underlying market trends and new product and service offerings. In particular, our healthcare specialty service segment has outperformed our expectations across the board growing constant currency organic revenues 10% year-to-date. Life Sciences whose capital equipment business has now had two strong quarters in a row with continued strong backlog grew constant currency organic revenue 8% in the first nine months of the year. Our AST business continues to experience increased volume from our core medical device customers. In addition, I'm pleased to report that our facility in Puerto Rico which is now back to normal production and has been since December much faster than we anticipated. We originally thought that the hurricane in Puerto Rico could impact profit in our AST segment by as much as $3 million this year. Based on where we stand today, we now expect the impact to be just $1 million, all of which was incurred in the third quarter. In addition, we have recently launched our sustainable EO sterilization service offerings, which will assist customers in developing strategies to reduce the amount of ethylene oxide used during sterilization, at the same time achieving prescribed sterility assurance levels, that is good for our customers and good for the environment. Within healthcare products, we have a solid growth in organic revenue fueled in part by many new launches including our newest 20 minute biological indicators for low-temperature sterilization named Celerity. This growth in recurring revenue has been a strong factor in our growth in healthcare for the last couple of years. Celerity is but one of about 30 new products we're releasing in our healthcare products segment this year. Healthcare capital equipment has had somewhat lighter revenue than anticipated, with shipments down year-over-year, but that is offset by a nice pickup in backlog on both a sequential and year-over-year basis and a pipeline of potential future business that is solid. As you know, capital equipment businesses can be lumpy and we had strong shipments last year, especially in our fourth quarter. So we're optically concerned with healthcare capital. Moving on to the impact of tax reform in the U.S. Mike has already discussed the specific impact to STERIS in the third quarter and our expected outcome for fiscal 2018. But we will wait until our fourth quarter call to provide more specific details. Our best estimate as of now is that STERIS will have an adjusted effective tax rate in the low 20 percentiles in fiscal 2019, down from the mid-20s this year. Let me be clear there are many complicated aspects of the new tax law and we and our advisors will continue to evaluate the impact of those tax provisions on STERIS and naturally, we'll be working to legally minimize our taxes. As is the case with many companies, the U.S. corporate tax reform results in significant additional earnings for STERIS to use to strategically grow our business and return value to our customers, our people and our shareholders. This will make us more competitive with our global competitors, many of whom manufacture outside of America. One of our first decisions on that front that we announced in our press release this morning, is that we will be paying a one-time special bonus to all U.S. employees other than senior executives. The total bonus payout is expected to be about $7 million, which we plan to exclude from our fiscal 2018 adjusted earnings. This is just one example of our continuing investments in our people who are the foundation of our success. Turning to our revised outlook for 2018, we are maintaining our outlook for 4% to 5% constant currency organic revenue growth for the full fiscal year. I would remind you that our fourth quarter last year was extraordinary, so we do have particularly difficult comparisons in Q4. Reflecting our expected operating performance at the high-end of our previous guidance, plus the benefit of the lower effective tax rate, we now expect earnings per share to be in the range of $4.10 to $4.16, which is either 9% or 11% growth from prior year levels. We are very pleased with our overall performance so far this year and are on track for another solid year of growth and record performance and look forward to many more. Thank you for joining us today and for your continued support of STERIS. I will now turn the call back to Julie for Q&A.