Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Walgreens Boots Alliance fourth quarter 2019 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 ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Gerald Gradwell, please go ahead.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. I'm here today with Stefano Pessina, our Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance, James Kehoe, our Global Chief Financial Officer, and Alec Gurley, Co-Chief Operating Officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance and President of Walgreens. Before I hand you over to Stefano to make some opening comments, I will, as usual, take you through the legal safe harbor and cautionary declarations. Certain statements and projections of future results made in this presentation constitute forward-looking statements that are based on our current market, competitive, and regulatory expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially. Except to the extent required by the law, we undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement after this presentation, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, or otherwise. Please see our latest Form 10-K and 10-Q for a discussion of risk factors as they relate to forward-looking statements. In today's presentation, we will use certain non-GAAP financial measures. We refer you to the appendix in the presentation materials available on our Investor Relations website for reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and related information. You'll find a link to the webcast on our Investor Relations website at investor.walgreensbootsalliance.com. After the call, this presentation and webcast will be archived on the website for 12 months. I will now hand you over to Stefano.

Thank you, Gerald, and hello, everyone. Today, I am pleased to report that we delivered quarterly results broad in line with our expectation. In doing so, we close our financial year roughly flat, year on year, which is, again, in line with the expectation we set in April. That said, it has not been an easy task for us to recover from a very difficult second quarter, and there has been a lot of hard work done by our teams to deliver these results over the past two quarters. We have continued to make progress against our four strategic priorities, accelerating the digitalization of our company in terms of the way we use technology, to help us run our businesses more efficiently and effectively, and more importantly, to enhance and transform the products and services we offer our patients and customers, and in the way we deliver those services. Performing and restructuring our retail offering, making sure we provide our customers what they want, in the way they want, and using the strength of our extraordinary local presence as an asset to support and reach a modern multi-channel, tailored, and far more focused, responsive, and interactive retail experience, and creating within our stores a network of healthcare destinations baked by our digital investments providing both services and support. This will enhance our role as a co-provider of healthcare to the communities we serve and highly effective and efficient resource for patients and payers alike. And of course, to support all of these and to deliver the changes we need to structure our company in a market that constantly demands ever more responsiveness and efficiency we are delivering on our transformational cost management program. It is important to make that point. This is about transformation for us, both driving out costs and reinvesting in the business to help fund the investments that we need to make to deliver our strategic priorities. This program is truly about savings. to invest for growth. Our teams have worked hard on the development of these strategies and are working just as hard on their delivery. We have identified an excellent group of partners that bring our skills, experience, and resources to deliver our goal better, more effectively, and more efficiently than we could do alone. We are transforming not just our businesses, but our business model to deliver future growth. We have been very clear in our current expectation for the financial year ahead. James will cover them in detail as part of this financial review. Looking forward to 2020, we expect adjusted earnings per share to be roughly flat on a constant currency basis. Excluding the impact of the 2019 bonus headwind, we would expect mid-single digit adjusted earning per share growth. And looking forward, we see a clear line to sustainable profitable growth, driven by the work we are doing and the investments we are making. I will now hand over to James and Alex to talk you through today's earnings and update. And we'll come back to take your questions at the end. James?