GE HealthCare Technologies Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to GE Healthcare's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 1-1 again. I would now like to turn the call over to Carolyn Borders with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator. Good morning and welcome to GE Healthcare's third quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm joined by our President and CEO, Peter Arduini, and Vice President and CFO, Jay Saccaro. 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. With that, I'll hand the call over to Peter.

Thanks, Carolyn, and thanks to all those joining us today. In the third quarter, we delivered 1% organic revenue growth, in line with our expectations, with strong performance in the U.S. across all segments and solid growth in pharmaceutical diagnostics. In the quarter, we delivered positive price and volume. Organic orders growth was 1%. Excluding China, reported sales growth was approximately 5%, and orders growth was 4%. reflective of a healthy capital equipment market outside of China. At a total company level, we reported strong growth and backlog in the quarter that was primarily driven by services. As a reminder, multi-year service agreements support our recurring revenue profile with a high level of revenue predictability at accretive margins. In the U.S., strong orders and sales were driven by multi-year enterprise deals primarily made up of imaging products, particularly PET and CT systems, which are critical to the diagnosis and treatment of chronic diseases. We are pleased with the progress that we're making to secure long-term partnerships, which is foundational to our growth strategy. Another revenue driver in the quarter was PDX. The team continues to deliver for customers, and we've seen PDX report seven quarters of high single-digit or double-digit organic revenue. Turning to China, we continue to monitor the market, which has been slow to recover. Coordination of stimulus funding is taking longer, so customers are still delaying normal purchasing. This is impacting overall growth in the China market in the near term. Bottom line is we continue to view this as a temporary challenge, and over the mid to long term, we see China as an attractive market. Our margin performance in the quarter demonstrates our ongoing cost optimization priority specifically the focus that we have on gross margin expansion, including product platforming and variable cost productivity. We continue to make progress with lean, taking action across the organization to make improvements for the benefit of our customers and to drive better performance in overall safety, quality, delivery costs, and innovation. With overall continued execution, we were able to deliver strong adjusted EBIT margin and adjusted EPS, And we're raising the low end of our full-year adjusted EBIT margin and adjusted EPS guidance ranges. Moving to innovation, we've talked about our leading role in Theranostics, a fast-growing field in molecular imaging, the diagnosis and treatment of certain types of cancer. We've made some notable advancements in this space over the last few months. In Europe, we're establishing a center of excellence with University Medicine Essen, a top research institution in Germany. We're also leading an approximately $28 million initiative with multiple partners to expand its use. In the U.S., we secured FDA clearance for a new software tool to standardize and automate the process of measuring and calculating radiation dosage during theranostics treatment. This tool will enable clinicians to safely increase patient access to this effective form of precision medicine. With that, I'll pass it to Jay, who will take us through the details of our third quarter performance and our outlook for 2024.