James L. Bierman
Analyst · Credit Suisse
Thank you, Craig, and good morning, everyone. Since Randy is going to review our quarterly financial results, I'll take a few minutes to discuss certain trends and points of interest that we're seeing in our Domestic business. Since we last spoke with you in July, we made progress on a number of strategic and tactical fronts. I'll begin with our provider customers. I'm pleased to report that during the quarter, we signed a new multiyear agreement with HPG, the last of our pending GPO agreements. We are also pleased that we have re-signed all of our HPG member customers. We appreciate the confidence and trust that these member systems have in Owens & Minor, which they demonstrated by recommitting to multiyear contracts with us. We believe the new contract aligns the efforts of our 2 organizations towards improving supply chain performance and contract compliance. Most significantly, with the signing of the HPG agreement, we now have multiyear agreements in place with each of the major GPOs. Negotiation on these GPO contracts began more than 18 months ago. So we are very pleased to have successfully completed this complex process. Our relationship with the GPOs and our health care provider customers remains solid and productive. Together, these GPO contracts represent more than 90% of our hospital business. Although, as we have said many times, our contractual relationships under these GPO agreements are actually made with each individual health system. Accordingly, there are some hospitals that are off-cycle with the GPO renewal dates. Those hospitals will come under the terms of the new GPO agreement on their respective contract anniversary dates. And looking at the results of the GPO renewal process, we are comfortable that the related gross margins are generally in line with our original expectations. As we have said for a while, we did take the opportunity throughout these GPO renewals and hospital sign-ups to price some of our unprofitable health care provider customers at rates that we believe were fair that turned out to be above those offered by some of our competitors. Consequently, we have seen a slight decline in domestic revenues for the year-to-date period due in part to the migration of those customers. However, Domestic revenues improved sequentially when compared to the second quarter of this year. As we have said, we intend to promote our relationships with the most efficient providers, who are capable of collaborating with us to achieve meaningful supply chain efficiencies. We will continue to focus our sales efforts on the provider systems that we believe will be the future players in a consolidating health care market. Turning now to our manufacturer customers. We are excited about the opportunities we are seeing in the manufacturing community. With our ability to offer logistics services to manufacturers in both the U.S. and Europe, we are finding that medical device companies that have not typically used traditional distribution to get their products to market are increasingly interested in our capabilities. As we have said before, we believe this untapped logistics market is conservatively sized at more than $50 billion. These medical and surgical products are being delivered directly to hospitals by manufacturers themselves, rather than by distributors. That is a sizable opportunity for us. And we are seeing an increasing level of interest among manufacturers, who see us as the only logistics partner solely dedicated to health care, capable of offering this service. For example, we are piloting a program with a medical device manufacturer, under which we will warehouse certain of their implantable products, and then take responsibility for stocking and managing the inventory levels within the hospital operating rooms. This is a fee-for-service inventory management arrangement with the inventory is on consignment to the hospital, until it is actually used in a surgery. In other words, we will have custodial responsibility for the product, but we'll not take title to it. This project is significant because the implants involved are the types of products that were typically managed by the manufacturers themselves all the way from the factory to the operating room. This is a prime example of our ability to help medical device companies innovate and adapt to changing provider customer needs. To meet the needs of our provider and manufacturing customers, we have had to make some changes to our supporting infrastructure. Nearly, a year ago, at our November Investor Day Conference, we targeted a level of exit and realignment activities for this year. To date, this year's exit and realignment activities are on plan, and primarily represent changes we have made to the domestic network to meet the evolving needs of our customer base. This certainly is a continuing process that is involving in response to market forces. We are pleased that during the quarter, we opened a regional distribution center. That in particular was in response to the needs of a large health care system customer. This regional facility is equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and systems. We were able to consolidate the operations of several smaller facilities into this larger, more efficient regional center. The advanced capabilities built into this distribution center, along with the associated efficiencies and cost reductions resulting from its size and scope should enable us to recognize economies of scale. We anticipate that we will leverage this facility in service of other strategic areas in the future. As we look at our infrastructure, part of our investment strategy is to ensure that we have the robust and flexible information technology systems, we need for growth. Consequently, during the quarter, we continued to invest in our 3-year $50 million information technology plan. For example, we improved our customer portal, analytics and data management capabilities. All of which are designed to enhance the customers experience. To date, we are on plan for the completion of our initial IT investment strategy. The continued work on realigning and expanding our infrastructure to meet the changing needs of our customer, the progress we made with our GPO contracts and the exciting new offerings to the health care manufacturers are concrete example of the investments we are making in Owens & Minor as we grow our company in the U.S. and abroad. In summary, our teams here in the U.S., in Europe and in Asia are working hard towards the same goals, to ensure that Owens & Minor is fast, flexible and positioned for growth in the years to come. Thank you. Now I ask Randy to provide us with the financial overview.