Jeffrey W. Henderson
Analyst · Cowen and Company
Thanks, George. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be discussing a solid start to fiscal 2012. My focus today will be on some financial trends and drivers of our Q1 performance, then I'll touch briefly on our full-year outlook. Let's start with Slide 4. During the quarter, we grew our non-GAAP EPS by 11% to $0.73 per share, driven by 10% revenue and 16% non-GAAP operating earnings growth. $26.8 billion of revenue recognized in Q1 is another all-time high for Cardinal Health. Even if you exclude the year-on-your impact of mid-year fiscal '11 acquisitions, it contributed about 5.3 percentage points. Underlying sales growth is strong. Although non-GAAP operating expenses were up 11%, more than half of this growth represents the expenses added to the mid-year acquisitions. But the sizable portion of the remainder relate to our continued focus on business system investments. Consolidated gross margin and non-GAAP operating margin rates both increased year-on-year, up 11 and 8 basis points, respectively. Interest and other expense came in $13 million higher than last year, driven by moderately higher debt levels and the impact of the recent market downturn on the value of our deferred compensation plan, which shows $7 million of other expense. As a reminder, losses in our deferred compensation accounts that are reflected in other expense were offset 1 for 1 by gains within SG&A, so have a net neutral impact on our P&L. Our non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 38.1% versus 37.1% last year. The slightly higher rate this quarter reflects unfavorable net discrete items of $4 million versus a net favorable of $3 million in the prior year and the unfavorable effect of changes in income mix. Finally, fair build in our share count versus last year, which is driven by a $300 million of share buyback, we completed in July and August. Our share count in Q1 was about 349 million diluted average shares outstanding versus 352 million in the prior year's quarter. As shown on Slide 10, we've now reduced our share count outlook for the full year to 352 million from 353 million. This reflects the $50 million of additional share repurchase we opportunistically completed in the quarter beyond our initial guidance assumptions of $250 million. Now let me comment on consolidated cash flow in the balance sheet. We had operating cash flow of approximately $500 million in Q1, driven by our strong earnings performance and further working capital reduction. Much of the working capital improvement came in the form of inventory efficiencies generated from transitioning Kinray to our National Logistics Center, a noteworthy milestone in our integration plan. Overall, our net working capital days ended the quarter at 7.5 days versus 8.3 in the prior year. We ended September with approximately $2 billion in cash, of which about $300 million is held overseas. This cash balance does not include our investments in held-to-maturity fixed-income securities, which are classified as other assets on the balance sheet and totaled $131 million at quarter-end. We continue to deploy our capital in a prudent bounce and opportunistic manner, keeping sight of our identified strategic priorities. On top of the $300 million of repo in the quarter, we increased our dividend payments by 10% and made $44 million of capital expenditures, mostly in IT. And as announced on Tuesday, we've initiated a tender offer to acquire Futuremed in Canada, utilizing our overseas cash in a strategically and financially attractive manner. This $165 million acquisition, which includes $40 million in debt, is a great example of identifying tuck-in opportunities that enhance our existing businesses. We anticipate this accretive transaction to close before July 1, 2012. And finally on a related note, I'm happy to report that Moody's just upgraded our ratings outlook to positive, recognizing the continuous improvements in our business profile. Now let's move to Q1 segment performance, referring primarily to Slides 5 and 6 and starting with our Pharma segment. Revenue in the segment increased 9.6%, with the Yong Yu and Kinray acquisitions we completed mid last year contributing 5.7 percentage points to this growth rate. Let me walk through a few of the drivers. In our Pharmaceutical distribution business, growth with existing customers was a strong driver. We achieved close to 30% revenue growth in our Specialty Solutions business, which continues to add customers and capabilities. Within our Nuclear business, we have seen continued positive momentum in customer wins despite the low energy market volume softness that George mentioned, which has dampened growth in the cardiac imaging business to a much greater degree than we anticipated coming into the year. Given the higher relative margin of this business, this has a disproportionate impact on our earning projections for the remainder of fiscal '12. Pharma segment profit margin rate increased by 11 basis points compared to the prior year's Q1, in part, reflecting a mixed shift toward non-bulk that George mentioned. We realized strong contribution from the Kinray and China acquisitions in the quarter. As you might expect, the actual contribution to segment profit growth is getting harder to calculate as we continue our Kinray integration effort and fold this business into our overall domestic platform. But the benefit is estimated at a little over 10 percentage points in total from both acquisitions. We continue to see strong contributions from the ongoing success of our generics programs, even though there are notably fewer generic new item launches from the prior year's quarter. Net generic deflation for our portfolio products was slightly steeper this year than last. As George mentioned, this was driven by certain newer generic products which were launched last year, and they're experiencing steeper deflation at this stage in their life cycle. I would note, however, that we did see some material inflation for certain more mature generic products. Finally, we know that a favorable resolution of certain open manufacture-related disputes was a positive driver of earnings in Q1 for Pharma. Due primarily to our ability to successfully resolve a number of these outstanding issues during the quarter, we realized a net $17 million benefit in this area, a somewhat larger impact than we would typically see and somewhat unique to this quarter. As an upside, this amount represents the largest of the unique or nonrecurring items which were reflected in our consolidated Q1 non-GAAP results. It was worth about a positive $0.03. The other noteworthy items, which were on the negative side of things, include the medical Presource issue with both $0.02 and about $0.01 worth of net unfavorable discrete tax items. Net-net, the Pharma segment had another solid quarter, resulting in an increase in segment profit of 19% to $363 million. George touched on our China operations during his remarks, and I also want to pause here for a moment to highlight this business, which is now reflected in both of our reporting segments, more on that in a moment, but is most prominent within Pharma. Our revenue in China was again very strong. In particular, we grew our local direct distribution business, a key focus area, by 28% during the quarter. We completed a small tuck-in acquisition in August, our first in China since establishing our platform last November to the Yong Yu deal. This acquisition provides us with direct presence in the Sichuan Province, key geographic area. We'll continue to pursue additional acquisitions to expand our geographic presence in the country and have a number of smaller deals in the pipeline. As George mentioned, we opened our ninth distribution center in China during Q1. We also continue to move forward in our evaluation and piloting of opportunities in other business areas. In summary, we continue to make great progress in China and remain very excited about the future of this platform. Now turning to our Medical segment. For the quarter, revenue increased by 9.7% to $2.4 billion, driven by increased sales for existing customers across all channels and net new customers. Within this performance are a number of highlights: Volume from net customer wins was again positive in the quarter. We saw a good increase in revenue from our Preferred products, which is particularly noteworthy as it is occurring in what has been reported externally as a continuing sluggish surgical procedure market. As we've highlighted in the past, this is a key growth and margin expansion opportunity for us. Another key growth opportunity we've highlighted is our Ambulatory business, which also had another strong quarter. Overall, ambulatory revenue growth of 15% is driven by well-above market performance in both the surgery center and physician office channels. And Cardinal Health Canada posted excellent revenue growth of more than 14%. We also had a couple of unique items which amplified our reported revenue growth that I wanted to bring to your attention. First is the ongoing effect of having transitioned our business with CareFusion with traditional brand of distribution model, a move that we highlighted in our Q3 earnings call last year. This change added 2 percentage points or $44 million to revenue and had the effect of depressing our segment profit margin rate during Q1 by 10 basis points. Secondly, heading into this year, we also made a refinement in the way we report results for international commercial operations. Previously, our results for our Puerto Rico and China businesses were reported as part of our Pharma segment, while Canada was included within the Medical segment. As an enhancement, and to be consistent with how we treat our U.S. operation, we are now splitting the results for these businesses based on the underlying business activity. We're doing this now while our international businesses are relatively small, in preparation for the future as they grow and become more relevant to both segment. But, for example, our med/surg distribution activity in China will now be recorded as part of our Medical segment financial results instead of within Pharma. I mentioned that international reporting change here because it contributed 1.7 percentage points to the Medical segment revenue growth rate in the quarter while having a relatively insignificant impact on segment profit growth. Now turning to Medical segment profit, which as we expected heading into the quarter declined 5% to $79 million, primarily driven by the negative impact of commodity prices on our cost of products sold and the impact of the Presource kit issue, which George described in more detail in his remarks. Specifically, commodity prices impacted our current period cost of goods sold by $18 million versus last year. For the full year, given the general reduction in commodity price levels since our last call, we are now forecasting a gross headwind of approximately $70 million in FY '12 versus the $80 million reflected in our prior guidance, which is a positive trend. We have seen some significant recent reductions in cotton, latex and oil. However, that rate of decrease has not yet been seen in the price of some of our oil derivative inputs such as resins. And one of our key raw components used in gloves, nitrile, has increased in price due to process involvements. But overall, the positive movement is good to see. At this point, much of this $70 million headwind is now locked in due to the lagging effect between price movements and the corresponding impact on our cost of products sold. Overpriced levels over the next couple months will be important as it relates to the impact in Q4 and beyond. Related to the Presource matter, we saw an impact of approximately $11 million in the quarter, coming from inventory reserves, incremental operating expenses and other related items. I should note that this amount, and any expected smaller residual impacts from our ongoing resolution plans, are reflected in our fiscal '12 guidance range. On the positive side of the ledger, the effect of these negative items was partially offset by the impact of increased volume to existing customers at net new business, as well as the margin benefit of increasing our sales of Preferred products. One final but very important note on the Medical segment. We successfully launched our Medical Business Transformation pilot at the beginning of October with no major issues. We remain on track for national implementation in our fiscal second half. Let's turn to Slide 7, which I'll just summarize. In total, GAAP results in the quarter include items that had negative $0.05 per share net after-tax impact, primarily from the exclusion of $0.04 of amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets of our non-GAAP results. This compares to $0.18 of net benefit in our GAAP results last year, mostly driven by $0.21 in gains on the sale of CareFusion stock. Now let me briefly comment on our fiscal '12 full-year outlook. We're maintaining our non-GAAP EPS guidance range at $3.04 to $3.19. This range excludes any potential impact from the Futuremed transaction, as we wouldn't typically reflect acquisitions in our guidance until they are closed. As we consider the full-year outlook in the context of our first quarter results, we remain positive about the year in front of us. There are clearly a few puts and takes. A Presource issue and a weaker-than-expected demand in nuclear low energy cardiac imaging are downsized to our original full-year expectations. Our commodity prices, lower share count and a favorable Q1 resolution on the Pharma manufacture-related issues should benefit the year. Although there's just one quarter behind us, there's still plenty of year to play out, including some key factors such as generic launch timing and value, generic deflation, granted price increases and further commodity price movements. One comment on the second quarter I'd like to make is to remind everyone that we expect Q2 to be our toughest period in terms of EPS growth rate, due in large part to the abnormally low tax rate we had in the second quarter of fiscal 2011. It also appears that Q2 might be the most difficult compare for the year-on-year commodity price impact within our Medical segment. I'm going to wrap up by saying I am very pleased with how we started the year. We continue to execute well in our base business and increase our momentum in our key strategic growth drivers, positioning us well for the future. Now let me turn it over to our operator to begin the Q&A session. Operator?