Eric Green
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is now open
Thank you, Quintin , and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As you saw in our press release, we delivered another quarter of strong growth on both the top and bottom lines from strong sales gains across the organization. And as a result of efficiency initiatives, put in place by our global operations team. Our performance in Q2, has shown once again, our customers positive reaction to our market-led growth strategy, with two good quarters behind us, and given our confidence in the underlying strength in future growth of the business, we are increasing our sales and EPS guidance for the full year. Bernard will take you through the details of our updated guidance later in the call. Let’s start with the specifics of our sales performance on Slide 4. Proprietary product sales grew by 7.5% in the quarter. Key to the growth strategy in this segment is customer adoption of our high-value products. These products offer higher levels of quality and productivity to our customers, seeking to meet the increase in regulations of the biopharmaceutical industry to improve their own manufacturing performance and to meet the demands of new molecules and therapies. High-value products make up more than 60% of our proprietary product sales and in Q2, organic sales of these products grew double-digits. Now let’s take a look at the organic sales growth of our market units. Sales within our Biologics market unit grew strong double-digits. In Q2, we experienced and an impressive uptake of our NovaPure and Westar components. We continue to see growing interest from biologic customers for these types of product solutions, and this demand is coming from volume growth of existing drugs and from newly commercialized drug products. We also saw a good uptake of Crystal Zenith containment solutions and our SmartDose technology platform. CZ growth is coming from both commercially available drugs as well as from pre-commercial molecules. We continue to experience high levels of customer activity across our SmartDose device platform for drugs in all stages of development. Looking ahead, we anticipate full year double-digit growth for the Biologics market unit. The Generics market unit had a solid quarter with high-single digit growth, high-value products also performed well in this market unit growing by double-digits. This was led by an increased uptake of Westar RS and RU products. We are pleased with the continued interest and adoption of our elastomer components, including the AccelTRA product line. In addition, we’re also seeing demand for our delivery and safety device platforms for use with generics medicines. We expect high-single digit growth in this market unit for the full year. Our pharma market unit experienced a small decline in the quarter due to the previously announced Vial2Bag product recall. If we’d exclude this impact, we saw a mid-single digit growth for pharma, led by FluroTec and Envision product sales. We expect the pharma market units to deliver full-year performance of low single-digit growth. A quick word about the Vial2Bag, as we noted on our last call, we remain committed to bringing this product back to the market. We are working to redesign certain aspects of the device, with the goal of returning to the market with enhanced product for hospitals and the patients they are treating. Let’s now turn to Contract Manufacturing. The segment of our business, once again posted strong sales of 10% over the prior year’s quarter. The majority of the growth continues to be in the diabetes market, led by sales of medical and drug delivery devices, and services. For the balance of the year, we expect that quarterly sales will be in line with the performance of the segment in Q1 and Q2 of this year, but that growth will moderate as this business runs up against more difficult year-over-year comparisons. We anticipate full year growth of high-single digits in Contract Manufacturing. I’d like to now review some business highlights from the quarter on Slide 5. We discussed at our last quarterly earnings update, the importance of expanding our Company’s reach to help us grow in the important Asia-Pacific region. We have established a direct presence in the very attractive South Korean market, through the acquisition of our distributor. Another example comes from our China team who recently hosted more than 200 customers from 70 companies for our West sponsored educational event reinforcing the technical expertise we can bring to our customers in this market. Our scientific and technical team continues to be at the forefront of the industry, presenting at numerous conferences, publishing their work in partnering with our customers to shape best practice in our field. We’re also pleased to announce that our NovaGuard Safety system recently won two India Packaging Awards for Excellence. This product is designed to help prevent accidental needle stick injuries, which is a serious concern for healthcare practitioners and their patients. Customers recognize the value of this product and as a result, we are seeing increased uptake. As our commercial team works with customers to provide solutions for their most demanding injectable containment and delivery needs, our operations team is working to help our business work more efficiently. They are driving for improve safety, higher quality, better service and increase profitability. We have implemented a number of lean initiatives across the organization through our One West management system that are really starting to pay off. I recently visited our plants in Europe, and saw firsthand the improvements that team has made to streamline internal processes, improve quality standards and address customer feedback more effectively. Customers are knows into and have provided us with very positive feedback at the conclusion of several recent audits. We’re also working to consolidate and optimize our global manufacturing network. By the end of the year, we will have 25 plants, a total reduction of four sites over the past two years. This broad restructuring program announced in Q1 of 2018 is on track to be completed by year-end and will provide significant savings for our business in the future. As a result of these efforts, and the growth of our high-value product portfolio, we achieved more than 180 basis points of consolidated gross profit margin expansion in the quarter. Thanks to margin improvements in both our Proprietary and Contract Manufacturing segments. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to our CFO, Bernard Birkett to go into more detail around our financial performance. Bernard?