Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.

ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by and welcome to walgreens boots alliance inc third quarter 2020 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 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 Investor Relations and Special Projects. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. On the call with me today are 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. 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. 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 forms 10-K and 10-Q for discussion of risk factors as they relate to forward-looking statements, and note in particular that these forward-looking statements may be affected by risks relating to the spread and impact of the coronavirus COVID pandemic. 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 gap 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 good morning, everyone. This quarter, once again, a main theme for our call has to be the global COVID pandemic and how it has impacted our business. So I want to start once again by thanking our people for their outstanding effort and dedication in the service of their local communities. despite facing challenging situations. Our teams have continued to work tirelessly, demonstrating exemplary dedication and commitment to help ensure continued availability of medicine and advice to our patients, and to maintain as efficient a supply chain as possible to our own pharmacies and our wholesale customers. Our priority is to protect the health and well-being of our customers and our people as we work to serve our communities, playing an essential role in the healthcare systems in many countries around the world. We made clear on our last earning call that we had only begun to see the impact of the COVID virus. In this quarter, The full extent of that impact is all too apparent. COVID has impacted all of our markets, but for us, the impact has been most significant in the US and especially in the UK markets. The immediate measures to address the spread of the virus have fundamentally changed the way our customers have had to approach managing their health and their daily shopping needs. As lockdowns and restrictions were introduced, we saw significant declines in footfall in our stores, at times reducing to a fraction of the pre-COVID levels. At the same time, we needed to keep the majority of our locations open to help ensure the timely supply of medication and to continue the vital support we offer people in our local communities. We have leveraged all the resources available to us in order to maintain our services, while ensuring adequate safeguards are in place to protect our teams and customers. As you would expect, we have seen unprecedented demand for home delivery and for online services. The development of these services is a core strategy for us. and during the crisis we have significantly increased our capacity to serve these demands. We believe that as the situation resolves, the process of lifting restrictions will be progressive, and we expect the return to a normalized state will take some time. Furthermore, we also believe that it is highly likely that certain aspects of customers' behavior may change permanently. Obviously, we have taken a hard look to our key strategic priorities and validated that they are still very relevant. As you know, our digitalization program was one of our four key strategic priorities, and you will see an acceleration of this over the coming months, together with the major expansion of our mass personalization and customer engagement platform that our recently announced agreement with Adobe and Microsoft will deliver. We are also accelerating our transformational cost management program. A strong focus on controlling and reducing costs is even more important now. Investing the savings to drive future growth is one of our top priorities. Of course, we remain absolutely committed to developing our healthcare offering across our network and making our store neighbor health destinations. We have taken a key strategic step forward here by expanding our partnership with VillageMD. This brings physicians and pharmacists together, both in physical location and through a virtual platform. It will also allow both companies to accelerate our virtual healthcare solutions and fits well with our own digital strategy. We believe the capability to access physicians alongside pharmacists in a closer and more coordinated manner is the future of community healthcare. I have already taken the first steps to ensure that, as a managing team, we accelerate our strategy with appropriate focus and clarity. I have asked Alex and Ornella, our co-chief operating officers, to become more geographically focused rather than dividing their responsibilities by operational discipline. Recognizing the significance of Walgreens as our largest single business, Alex will now focus entirely on our U.S. operations. Boots will now report in through Ornella, along with the rest of our international operations. Our businesses were broadly on track prior to the COVID crisis. Both Alex and Ornella are very clear on the need for us to move quickly to ensure we emerge from the current situation in a position of strength and prepare to return to sustainable long-term growth. I will now ask James and Alex to take you to our earnings presentation.