Eric Green
Analyst · Janney Montgomery. Your line is now open
Great. Thank you, Quinton. And good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. A little more than one year ago, we announced a realigned organizational structure to better support our market led strategy. We did this to heighten our focus on becoming the leader in the integrated containment and delivery of injectable medicines. We shared with you that this looks to be a long-term journey to feel growth and profits for West. And I'm pleased to say we are well on our way. We delivered a strong set of results in 2016 and we are poised to continue this growth in 2017. To recap for you we've reorganized our company into three major groups. Commercial, global operations, and innovation and technology. Within the commercial team, we created two segments proprietary products and contract manufactured products. To ensure alignment with our customers in addressing the specific needs of each, we created the pharma, generic and biologics market units. We transitioned away from a regionally focused operation to a globally managed network, expanding capacity and significantly reducing delivery lead times of critical high value products. At the same time, we raise the bar on our already industry leading quality metrics and increased our focus on operational efficiencies which has allowed us to better address the demand of our worldwide customer base. Under our newly formed innovation and technology team, we continue to build momentum by adding new high-value products to our components business, while achieving milestones successes with customer FDA approvals of drug using Crystal Zenith and SmartDose technologies. And through all of this transition, we continue to meet our long-term financial objectives. We ended the year with over 9% organic sales growth, which is above our long-term target of 6% to 8%. We expanded both growth and adjusted operating profit margins and generated strong 19% adjusted diluted EPS despite having a $0.04 FX headwind. Turning to Slide 4, when we look at the growth rates over the past year 2016 stands out as being an impressive year for both organic sales and adjusted EPS growth. We are pleased with our track record of creating incremental shareholder value year-over-year. Today we are laser focused on executing our long-term strategy, which should enable future growth at the same pace. Turning to Slide 5, looking at the year the proprietary products segment represented 79% of total sales with organic sales growth just under 10%. This segment was led by double-digit organic sales growth in biologic and generics market units, with mid-single digit growth in our pharma market unit. Organic sales growth of high valued products was 20% for the year. Our market leading position remains strong, as we achieve 90% participation on all of the new injectable drugs approved by the FDA in 2016. Our end markets remain stable and growing. Demand from our biologics customers was strong and steady throughout the year, as we continue to see demand from both large biologics and emerging biologics customers. Generics growth for the year was solid with exceptionally strong sales in the first half of the year, offset by a weaker Q4 as some of our large customers manage their inventory in response to our successful reduction in lead-time. Some of our generics customers placed very large volume orders, which can cause quarter-to-quarter variability. We believe on a 12-months rolling average these variability's typically even-out. When we look at our smaller generics customers which is over half of the market unit sales we have seen a much steadier growth pattern of high single to low double-digits. Pharma, which represents some of the largest and most mature customers delivered steady mid-single digit growth throughout the year. We see continued opportunities to migrate our Pharma customers from standard component to high value products and we are seeing good traction and synergies between our components business and contract manufacturing. Our contract manufacturing business which represented 21% of our total sales grew organically mid-single digit with double-digit growth in Q4, much of the Q4 outperformance is related to tooling sales as we are adding equipment on behalf of our customers and ahead of meaningful high volume campaign that will begin later this year. The typical tie between installing tooling equipment and commercial volumes is about 12 months to 18 months which makes us optimistic about accelerating growth for contract manufacturing as 2017 progresses. Turning to global operations on Slide 6. The team has had a number of successes in 2016, recall that our backlog had risen to approximately $450 million in Q1, because we’re capacity constrained for certain high value product lines. Due to our global operations focus our lead times to continued its improvement, the team increased operational efficiency and effectively added capacity to our network. As we ended the year, the backlog has come down to $373 million, an 8% decline at constant currency from 2015 year-end levels. Another area of success has come from the creation of a global supply chain and procurement organization, which is driving cost savings across the business and stronger management of our global supply base. At the same time, we continue to reinvest in our business for future growth. We recently completed and commissioned a 60,000 square foot expansion of our Dublin, Ireland contract manufacturing facility on time and within budget. I attended the opening in Dublin and was pleased to hear directly from customers how important the facility will be in helping them prepare for their product launches. Commercial production at Dublin has already begun and will ramp up throughout 2017. And we remain on schedule with the first phase of our Waterford Ireland site, which will manufacture insulin rubber sheeting. Additionally, we continue to build out high value product capacities in our other two centers of excellence in Kingston, North Carolina and in Singapore. Turning to Slide 7. 2016 was a year of new product launches by our innovation and technology team. Many of these were highlighted during the year, this is a good time to remind you that like many R&D projects, these are the results of years of work behind the scenes. Because our products are used in various medical application, we conduct extensive and time consuming testing and validation before any product is launched. Turning to Slide 8. This is a snapshot of our innovation and technology pipeline. While we often talk about CZ and SmartDose, the innovation and technology team is working on numerous project that will enhance our entire portfolio with new innovation and product line extensions to address customer need. On Slide 9. We have outlined our full year 2017 outlook. In October of last year, we set initial 2017 organic sales growth guidance to be at the high-end of our long-term range of 6% to 8%. With solid markets fundamentals, we are raising our 2017 organic sales growth outlook to a new range of 7% to 9%. As we have noted, we expect strong double-digit high-value product growth. In generics, we expect safely stock reduction to dissipate in the first half, with an acceleration in the second half resulting in the high-single to low double-digit growth for the full-year. Finally, we also expect a shift of sales from tooling to commercial product and contract manufacturing as the year progresses. We anticipate another year of strong gross margin expansion with R&D and SG&A providing an additional leverage. Resulting in adjusted EPS guidance in the range of $2.45 to $2.57. This represents a 12% to 18% year-over-year growth and includes a $0.05 to $0.07 EPS headwind from a stronger U.S. dollar. Excluding this impact EPS is anticipated to grow 15% to 21% which is twice our anticipated organic sales growth. Now, I'll turn it over to Bill Federici, who will provide more color on our financial performance. Bill?