GE HealthCare Technologies Inc.

Good day, everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to GE Healthcare's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To participate, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star 11 again. please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will hand the call over to the Chief Investor Relations Officer, Caroline Borders. You may begin.

Thanks, Operator. Good morning and welcome to GE Healthcare's second quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm joined by our President and CEO, Peter Arduini, and Vice President and CFO, Jay Sakharo. Our conference call remarks will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today's press release and in the presentation slides available on our website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements about our performance. These statements are based on how we see things today. As described in our SEC filings, actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties. And with that, I'll hand the call over to Peter.

Thanks, Carolyn, and thanks to all those joining us today. In the second quarter, we delivered 1% organic revenue and 3% orders growth, with all segments contributing. We also expanded margins despite headwinds in the China market. We saw particular strength in the U.S. given replacement cycles and increased use of imaging across disease stage for diagnostics and resilience in the ultrasound market. Excluding China, global revenue growth was 4% and orders growth was 6%. We believe we're gaining market share in each of our segments, and we are continuing to invest in products and services that will accelerate growth in the future. As it relates to China performance, we previously communicated that the region would experience negative sales growth in the first half as we faced a challenging compare. At the time, we expected positive sales growth in the second half. Today, the prolonged timing of the rollout of the new stimulus announced earlier this year is impacting timing of orders and sales. We expect a continued sales decline in China year over year in the second half, and we anticipate growth in China will be negative for the year. As a result, we're lowering our total company full-year organic revenue growth guidance. It's important to note that despite this revenue reduction, we are maintaining our EPS guidance for the year. Although we're disappointed with the second half reduction in sales growth, this is a temporary challenge, and we expect to see China market orders recovery later in the year. We continue to view this market as an attractive long-term opportunity. While China weighed on orders and revenues, we're encouraged by our margin performance in the quarter. Our team has embraced lean and identified process and product improvements at the end of 2023 and the first half of 2024. We're now seeing those benefits coming through our P&L, along with increased customer satisfaction, ultimately resulting in higher win rates in products and services. We're making great progress executing improvements that deliver better value to our customers and patients and eliminating waste, leveraging continuous improvement, or Kaizen. We run approximately 400 sessions throughout the year and recently completed our global CEO Kaizen Week. During the week, we held 28 events across our sites where my leadership team and I joined colleagues to drive and execute process changes and improvements. which is a key aspect of a good Kaizen. Teams were focused on growth, cost, and working capital improvements, some of which have immediate impact at the end of the week, while others will drive impact later in the year. One of our cost improvement Kaizens, a team consisting of engineering, quality, and sourcing, built a plan for a high-running CT platform that will reduce overall costs by 23%, with 15% coming out in the first year. In Waukesha, my team focused on improving our responsiveness to customer demand as well as cost savings for the CT and PET CT products that we manufacture there. We created a visual management tool called a HyJunka board that shows plant capacity, system availability, and customer orders. The new tool will help us level load production, optimize manufacturing flow, and meet customer demand while shrinking the lead time on our critical OmniLegend PET CT system by 31%, and reduce future costs to create these scanners. It was an energizing week for all. Leveraging our productivity progress this year, we are raising our adjusted EBIT margin guidance, and we're reaffirming our outlook for adjusted EPS and free cash flow. Jay will discuss our outlook in greater detail later in the Moving to commercial execution milestones, as I mentioned, we had a strong quarter in the U.S. where we secured more than $800 million of multimodality equipment, software, and service contracts. The U.S. market continues to be robust, particularly in imaging, IGT, and ultrasound. We saw strong orders and sales growth in the region and continue to see a healthy pipeline for growth. In July, we made two important announcements to develop proprietary AI tools to help expedite clinical and operational efficiencies. This included our agreement to acquire the AI division of Intelligent Ultrasound, a developer of AI tools for women's health ultrasound products, and a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services to build foundation models and generative AI tools to streamline hospital operations and care delivery. Now I'll pass it to Jay who will take us through the details of our second quarter performance. Jay?