Sunny Sanyal
Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead, sir
Thank you, Howard. Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. Fiscal year 2017 was a transformational year for us. We successfully completed our spin-off up from Varian to become a new publicly-traded company and we closed the major acquisition of imaging business from PerkinElmer. We accomplished these actions while maintaining our focus on growing revenue and providing excellent customer service. Our strong performance in the fourth quarter and the fiscal year reinforces our belief that our emphasis and commitment to X-ray imaging components has enabled us to serve our customers better and provide greater value to our stockholders. Let me start by highlighting a few financial results, a little later Clarence will discuss our results in more detail. For fiscal year 2017, our revenues increased 13% to $698 million with the Medical segment up 10% and the Industrial segment up 24% over the prior year. This growth reflects a 3% increase in revenues or $17 million from our organic business and the addition of $61 million in revenues in the last five months of the year from the acquired imaging business. Revenues from this acquired imaging business increased 5% from the same five month period in prior year. In the Medical segment, we experienced good growth from sales of our CT tubes as well as our mammography, dental and surgery components. Sales of CT tubes are up for the year driven by activity in Asia. As previously discussed, we expect demand for CTs in emerging markets, particularly China, to continue to grow. We're continuing to see evidence of that as local OEMs make progress towards introduction of new systems using our CT tubes, reinforcing our confidence in both the market opportunity and our competitive position. Growth in dental and mammography applications was mainly due to continued adoption of new 3D imaging applications for dental implant procedures and tomosynthesis for mammography. The proliferation of these applications has been driven by improved performance and cost effectiveness of X-ray detectors as well as technology advances in X-ray sources, which enables 3D imaging at lower dose, higher resolution and faster speed. Our Industrial segment also performed well mostly driven by sales of security products. During the year, we experienced a recovery in demand from our high-energy linear accelerators for both cargo screening and industrial inspection applications. For airport security, we continue to work with our OEM customers to develop new applications. Several projects are focused on incorporating our X-ray tube technology into CT applications, which improve screening effectiveness for carry-on and checked baggage. In addition, we now have a new platform for compact and lightweight linear accelerators for mobile cargo screening and industrial non-destructive testing applications. We see these as future growth opportunities for us. Now looking at the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2017, our revenues increased 25% to $216 million. This growth reflects a 5% increase in revenues or $9 million from our organic business and the addition of $35 million in revenues from the acquired imaging business. This was the largest quarter in our history even without the contribution from the acquisition. We recovered from a soft third quarter with revenues in the fourth quarter that were $46 million higher than the previous quarter. During the fourth quarter, our sales team was very active and closed several new multi-year agreements for X-ray tubes, linear accelerators and digital detectors. Most of these have three year terms and they are collectively valued at approximately $200 million over the life of the agreements. We view this as a favorable shift in the way our customers want to work with us compared to historical one year agreements. I'm excited to report that the sales activity included an agreement with another local OEM customer in China for our CT tubes. Combining this new agreement with a one that we announced last quarter, we expect them to generate more than $100 million of incremental revenues over the respective three year lives of these agreements. We anticipate that the development work, which we did in the past few years, will result in additional agreements for our CT tubes with local Chinese OEMs in the future. Switching gears, I'm pleased to report that the integration of the acquired imaging business continues to move forward on schedule. Cross-selling is a key focus. Last quarter, we discussed meeting with senior executives of customers of acquired imaging business. Since then we've met with product and R&D teams to present our expanded portfolios beyond the detector only business. We’re active discussions and negotiations with two major customers to supply our X-ray sources and our new subsystem package of an X-ray tube, generator, high-voltage cables and software. I’m optimistic that these cross-selling efforts will result in new commercial projects over time. We have made a lot of progress at emerging supply chain operations and qualifying new sources for certain critical materials, which is a key step towards achieving the anticipated cost savings we have outlined on our last call. Behind the scenes, we completed the first phase of computer systems integration with the successful migration of three sites onto the Varex computer networks and ERP system. Overall, we believe we're on track to achieve our cost synergy goal of $5 million in fiscal year 2018. Our digital detector business grew significantly during the fiscal year with addition of the acquired imaging business. One of our long-term growth objectives – growth opportunities in this business is the ongoing conversion of analog film and CR based imaging methods to digital directors. Let me give you a few market updates. Adoption of digital detectors is continuing due to new technologies as well as reimbursement changes. In the U.S., CMS has already reduced reimbursement for the use of film-based radiographic imaging systems by 20%. Further beginning in January 2018 reimbursement for the use of CR based imaging systems will be reduced by 7% and deepened to 10% in 2023. In addition, the demand for digital detectors for surgical imaging systems is starting to accelerate. Approximately 8,000 mobile C-arms systems are sold each year around the world, which represents a significant opportunity for us. With the addition of the acquired imaging business, we are now able to offer an expanded portfolio of both amorphous silicon and CMOS based digital detectors for mobile C-arms. In fiscal year 2017, we introduced more than a dozen new and updated medical products. At the end of November, we will once again be at RSNA Conference in Chicago. This annual event is the largest of the 30 or so tradeshows that we participate in around the world each year. We will be displaying some of our newest products and technologies at RSNA. More importantly many of our OEM customers will be showcasing their next generation X-ray imaging systems that have our new technology inside. I'm proud to say that most of the X-ray imaging systems at RSNA are likely to have a Varex component inside. Examples of our new technologies include integrated CT subsystem packages that would include a CT tube, generator, tube control unit, high voltage connectors and heat exchanger, a high resolution, high performance radiographic digital detector, a family of mammography detectors for value, mid-tier and high-end tomosynthesis applications, a series of collimators from manual to fully motorized for both radiographic and fluoroscopic applications and an image acquisition workstation tailored to mid-sized OEMs for use with various fluoroscopic imaging applications. Lastly, I'm pleased to report that during the fourth quarter, our Salt Lake City facility received LEED Gold Certification for the 150,000 square foot expansion that was completed in 2016. As a large menu manufacturer, energy efficiency and sustainability are important to us and we feel strongly about using resources wisely. Over the past few years, we have completed dozens of projects that saved Varex, more than 6 million kilowatt hours of energy each year at our Salt Lake City facility. This equates to a 21% annual energy reduction for us that has freed up enough electricity to power more than 7,000 homes. With that let me hand over the call to our CFO, Clarence Verhoef, to talk about our financial performance in greater detail.