Miles White
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Well, I'd say a couple of things, first of all, about the guidance. We are seeing strength in our growth drivers. We've got a lot of launches going on in all segments across the board. We're going to be opening up the capacity, new manufacturing and so forth to supplement Libre. The Alinity systems are obviously successfully rolling out. MitraClip is picking up momentum. A lot of the businesses that I've been sort of chronically dissatisfied with from time to time have also in sequential improvement, which I'm happy to see. I'm never quite satisfied with that. But the pharmaceutical business, the cardiac rhythm management business, the stent business, neuromodulation, the point-of-care Diagnostics business, the Rapid Diagnostics business, which is primarily the Alere acquisition, they're all showing sequential sales growth improvement, which is what we've planned, what we've worked for, et cetera. So based on the strength across the board of all of that, we felt comfortable that, frankly, our growth rate on the top line going forward, we sort of see in that 7% to 8% range. And I challenged the team. I said, is this temporary for the quarter or for the half year thing? Or do we feel fairly sustainable about this? And we feel sustainable about it.
So I think that's all good. And then with record earnings, there's a step-up in earnings here in the second half, earnings growth rate. And it's just an unusual quarter. I mean, we always target, as you know, at the beginning of the year, double-digit growth. We always had kind of an aggressive or at least ambitious target for ourselves going into the next year. That's no different now. So in the second half, our earnings remain strong. I don't know, I'm kind of -- I feel pretty good if we do the numbers we say and we never fall short. So it's 18% on the bottom line right now. So you're asking me about what we do to get to the high end of the range? I'm thinking, geez, isn't that good enough? It's a pretty healthy growth rate. So 7% to 8% on the top and high double digit teens on the bottom, I think, is probably best-in-class in the peer group that we're compared to and several different peer groups that we're compared to. And quite frankly, with the breadth of products launching and rollouts, obviously, there's always challenges somewhere in the world in some way, but we seem to be doing pretty well across the board here in all areas, and I think that's a pretty good investment.