Glenn A. Eisenberg - Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings
Management
Sure. First, I guess on the EPS and ASC 606 and the guidance. As you saw when we gave our preliminary assessment and when we came out with our guidance, we did give preliminary restated revenue numbers for 2017 and then our growth rates for 2018, which was effectively adding the investigator fees and the other pass-through expenses. And so, as you saw in our change in guidance or the updating of our guidance, none of the growth rates on the revenue side were due to ASC 606. It was due to the strength of organic revenue growth within Diagnostics as well as the change in the currency. On the earnings side, it's a little bit more challenging. There, while we did a sampling of the contracts that we have, and again, over 800 of them, the impact on the earnings was fairly negligible. We assume that over when we got to all 800 contracts going through the detailed review that they would be offsetting because effectively they were all pass-through. When we did the analysis and updated it, again, for every one of the contracts, what we saw was that, relative to the sample that we used initially, our contracts tended to be earlier stages of completing of the trials. And because the investigator fees and the other pass-through expenses tend to be more weighted towards the middle of the contracts, we were more weighted with earlier-stage contracts. And as a result, they caused our percentage of completion to change where effectively it moved it out a little bit. So the earnings, and use 2017 as an example, there again we would assume that it would have a nominal impact. It had around a $55 million impact in earnings that will again be pushed out to future periods. And then similarly now in our guidance for 2018, as we roll those contracts forward, we have around, call it, $35 million of reduction in earnings relative to the old accounting standard, so less than the impact in 2017. But again, those earnings will be pushed out in the future as well. With regard to the offsetting of the $0.20 to $0.30 impact from ASC 606, we talked about the strength of our organic revenues. We've talked about the impact that currency was favorable as well. When we gave our original guidance, at that point, we knew the adverse impact from weather other than there was some still bad weather later in the period, but the bulk of it was early. And we knew about the benefit of the legal settlement that was effectively going to be an offset to that. So relative to the guidance we provided, both of those were kind of muted out. The change really is driven off of the strong performance we had in the first quarter, and again, an improved outlook for the remainder of the year.