Eric Green
Analyst · Janney
Thank you, Quintin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As we stated in our press release, we had another solid quarter and are well positioned for the remainder of the year. Looking at our financial performance, the company generated reported second quarter sales of $388 million, on a constant currency sales growth of 8.2%. The growth was broad based across all market units and geographies. Adjusted operating margin was 15.4%, equaling the record high we set last quarter and 150 basis points better than the prior year quarter. All of this led to Q2 adjusted diluted EPS of $0.59, which is a 26% increase over the prior year quarter. I am pleased with how our market-led strategy is taking shape. The key pillars of that strategy are customer experience, operational excellence and product and service expansion. And I'll be highlighting in my remarks several activities that our commercial, global operations and innovation and technology teams are executing. Turning the slide 4, looking at our sales performance, we had solid contribution from both of our segments. Sales of proprietary products grew 8.9% organically, driven by double digit growth in generics and high single digit growth in biologics and pharma. Our high-value product portfolio which represents over 50% of segment sales grew 17% organically. Similar to the trends last quarter, we experienced strong customer demand across the high-value products spectrum, particularly for Westar products, Daikyo components, FluroTec products and increasing adoption of NovaPure offerings that ensure the highest standards of quality and performance. Contract-manufactured products, which represents about 20% of overall sales, grew 5.1% organically, an uptick from the first quarter growth level. Sales of drug delivery and diagnostic products more than offset continued softness in consumer products. We have good momentum heading into the second half of 2016 as our teams are ramping up tooling activities to support additional projects that will commence in Q4 later this year and into 2017. We have stated that a key strategy for the company is to become even more market-facing and improve customer experience. A key initiative in commercial is to engage with customers to provide them with valuable technical and scientific information in support of the selection and use of drug containment and delivery systems. During this quarter, West focused on providing this technical engagement in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region. We held several seminars in China and India, with more than 200 customers in attendance, providing insights about market trends, challenges in selecting containment solutions for injectable medicine and strategies for selecting prefilled delivery systems for best patient outcomes. I am pleased on how our commercial organization is engaging with our customers and creating value. Turning to global operations on slide 5, we generated a gross profit margin of 34.4%, a new record high and an increase of 160 basis points from the last year. In addition to product mix shift to high-value products with expanded margins, we made good progress with our manufacturing throughput and improved efficiencies through lean initiatives across our global network. Over the course of the second quarter, I visited 13 locations across Asia, Europe, South America and the United States and I'm pleased on how our market-led strategy and key initiatives are being embraced and implemented throughout our operations. In fact, I had the opportunity to see firsthand how we drive operational excellence in our plants to continuously improve safety, quality, delivery and cost. I want to share a few areas that our global operations team is focused on and the results we are seeing. The first is quality. As you know, we place a high emphasis on working with our customers to address their quality needs. As a result of our initiatives, we have reduced out-of-spec products by more than 33% year over year. To dimension this achievement, of the 32 billion components that our proprietary segment sells each year, we have achieved an out-of-specification metric of well under 100 parts per 1 billion sold. Needless to say, quality remains a key differentiator for West and we continue to raise the bar. As we stated in the last quarter's call, our global operations has been working to reduce order lead times to our customers. We're now seeing shorter lead times across our network and as a consequence our backlog is down from peak Q1 levels. We expect further lead time improvements in the back half of the year and a reduction of year over year backlog growth which will better match our core demand. During my travels, I also visited our state-of-the-art facility now under construction in Waterford, Ireland. The project remains on-time and within budget. As you can see from this recent photo, phase one includes this impressive building in the foreground, which will house new capacity to manufacture CD material for cartridges used within insulin pen injector systems, expected to be online for commercial sales in early 2018. Turning to slide 6, earlier this month, Amgen announced that it received FDA approval of its Repatha drug for use with our SmartDose technology platform. I'm proud of our innovation and technology team for achieving this milestone. Our team continues to work with Amgen as they prepare for an August commercial launch in the US. For West, this marks just the beginning for our integrated injectable drug delivery strategy. When you look at Amgen’s monthly dosing system for Repatha, you see a product combining several of our proprietary containment and delivery technologies. We continue to see strong interest by our customers in our on-body drug delivery technology, including several customers that are currently evaluating SmartDose. Repatha also marks the third FDA approved use of Crystal Zenith containment technology over the last 12 months. We continue to work with several customers to test CZ technology with their drugs in formal stability studies and are working with numerous customers that are conducting early stage evaluations. Turning to slide 7, I want to highlight a new product line that’s important to our customers’ success. While SmartDose and Crystal Zenith get a lot of attention, the vast majority of our sales and products come from our components business. And this business has been growing as we continue to introduce new high-value products to meet our customers’ needs for high quality [intervenic] containment and delivery of their important drugs. The newest member of our high-value product family is the 1-3mL NovaPure Plunger. We’re seeing a trend towards larger volume injections beyond typical 1 mL applications, especially for new biologic therapies in auto injectors. We have introduced a new 1-3mL Plunger developed using quality by design principles. The NovaPure platform is the highest standard of quality in our portfolio. Turning to slide 8 and the outlook for the balance of 2016, our teams have responded well to the realignment of our organization at the start of the year and have embraced our market-led strategy. We have two good quarters under our belt and we're well positioned as we enter the second half of the year. Therefore, we are raising our organic sales growth outlook for the year to 7% to 9% compared to a prior outlook of 6% to 8%. We're also raising the lower end of our adjusted EPS guidance range, which is now $2.15 to $2.25, an increase over prior year of 17% to 23%. Now, I’ll turn it over to Bill Federici, our CFO, who will provide more color on our financial performance. Bill?