Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Walgreens Booth Alliance, Inc. First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. 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, Senior Vice President of Special Projects and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our first 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 harbour 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 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. As you will see from our figures, it has been a slow start to the financial year with a competitive U.S. pharmacy environment and soft trading conditions in the U.K. That said, as you will hear, there are a number of items affecting the year-on-year comparisons. And given the initiatives we have underway, we are maintaining our full year guidance. In the quarter, we continue to make progress against all four of our core strategic priorities. We are making progress in moving our data resources to a new and more flexible cloud-based infrastructure with the significant benefits that brings. We have also made good progress with the development of new services to build on this new infrastructure. to enhance our customer experiences, make our teams more efficient and effective, and open new opportunities for our businesses. Clearly, this work on the digitalization of our company must and does closely tie in with our work to modernize our retail offering and the shape and structure of our retail footprint. At the same time, we are working with partners to redefine the delivery of healthcare in the community and the important role of pharmacy in the immediate and longer-term future. And all of this is, of course, supported and fueled by our transformational cost management program, which has made substantive progress during the quarter. Finally, we have also continued to make progress on a number of significant partnerships, both established and new, to enhance our offering and efficiency and to help drive growth in our businesses. In the quarter, we entered into a procurement joint venture with Kroger, building on the already strong relationship that has been formed between Kroger and Walgreens. And, we announced a joint venture with McKesson to bring together our two businesses in Germany, improving our reach and scale with a focus on enhancing the efficiency and performance of our combined wholesale operations in the significant German pharmaceutical wholesale market. I will come back to make a few comments on the future at the end of our presentation. But now I will ask James and Alex to take us through the results in a little more detail. James? Thank you, Stefano, and good morning.