DENTSPLY SIRONA Inc.

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the q4 2024 dense fly serona earnings conference call at this time all participants are in a listen-only mode please be advised that today's conference is being recorded after the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session to ask a question please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced to withdraw your question please press star 1 1 again i would now like to hand conference over to your speaker today Andrea Daly, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Josh, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Densly Serona fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me for today's call is Simon Campion, Chief Executive Officer, Herman Kudo, Interim Chief Financial Officer, and Rich Rosenzweig, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and General Counsel. I'd like to remind you that an earnings press release and slide presentation related to the call are available in the investor section of our website at www.dentsplyserona.com. Before we begin, please take a moment to read the forward-looking statements in our earnings press release. During today's call, we may make certain predictive statements that reflect our current views about future performance and financial results. We base these statements and certain assumptions and expectations on future events that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Our most recently filed Form 10-K and any updating information in subsequent SEC filings list some of the most important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our predictions. On today's call, our remarks will be based on non-GAAP financial results. We believe that non-GAAP financial measures offer investors valuable additional insights into our business's financial performance, enable the comparison of financial results between periods where certain items may vary independently of business performance, and enhance transparency regarding key metrics used by management in operating our business. Please refer to our press release for the reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results. Comparisons provided are to the prior year quarter unless otherwise noted. A webcast replay of today's call will be available on the investor section of the company's website following the call. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Simon.

Thank you, Andrea, and thank you all for joining us this morning for our Q4 2024 earnings call. Today, I will start by providing an overview of our recent performance. Then Herman will cover Q4 and full year 2024 financial results and our 2025 outlook. And I'll finish with a strategic operating update. Before we get started, earlier this month we augmented our board with the addition of Dan Scavilla and Mike Barber, two proven leaders with skill sets that are additive to the board and that will be highly beneficial as we continue to execute on our transformation strategy. Dan, CEO of Globus Medical, is a seasoned executive with deep expertise in commercial deployment and business integration, having successfully led the merger of Globus and Nuvasiv. Mike brings over 40 years of experience in product management and innovation, including executive leadership roles at GE, where he was responsible for the transformation of the company's digital X-ray program. Now let's start with some key points on slide three. In the fourth quarter, we were pleased to see green shoots in several areas of the business, including a return to organic sales growth in Europe of approximately 2% and global growth in imaging of nearly 13%. WellSPECT exceeded estimated market growth rates, posting approximately 7% growth. SureSmile continued to grow globally, achieving a nearly 4% increase over the prior year quarter, with over 20% growth in Europe for Q4 and the full year. Fourth quarter results in Europe included continued momentum in Germany. We are encouraged by the positive step change we saw in performance in the second half of 2024. The key actions we took to improve performance and address market dynamics included reintroducing Orthophos SL, improving commercial execution by directing sales personnel towards our most significant growth opportunities, and enhancing our training to address customer needs. This translated into results that exceeded sales targets since the relaunch and better positions us for success in 2025. Excluding the incremental charges associated with BITE taken in the fourth quarter, the business outperformed our latest guidance by almost 2% on the top line in Q4 and almost 4% above the midpoint of our full-year adjusted EPS guide. In 2024, we finished the year with organic sales down 3.5%, in line with our latest guidance. Let me give you some color around this. BITE reduced sales by 1.2%, and there was a 2.5% impact from CTS. While CTS faced both global macroeconomic and price pressure, our relaunch of Orthophos SL that I've just mentioned and the launch of PrimeScan2 propelled second-half growth in imaging and facilitated volume growth throughout the year in scanners. This is the third year in a row that we have demonstrated volume growth in scanners, the gateway to patient treatment and clinical workflows. SureSmile posted four quarters in a row of high single-digit to double-digit growth on aligners, and we'll speak a little later on about our investments to accelerate our SureSmile business. Endo demonstrated the importance of innovation with our new Exmart ProPlus motor and Reciproc BlueFi launches, leading to competitive conversions in the U.S. during the second half of the year. WellSpec delivered another year of strong growth across all regions. Our January survey of over 1,300 respondents indicated that our major markets remain relatively unchanged, with utilization showing slight improvement across most categories, but continued softness in elective procedures. Survey results also continue to indicate strong interest in driving efficiencies through workflow improvement, which aligns with our strategy. For 2025, we expect the external environment to remain largely unchanged. And as such, we expect organic sales to be down 2% to 4% for the year, including a negative bite impact. As we've said, we view our current portfolio, innovation engine, commercial scale, and clinical education platform as key value drivers. We made a strategic decision to redeploy certain bite resources to our Sure Smile platform. they have commenced leveraging their strong capabilities to drive direct-to-consumer demand and revamp e-commerce. Furthermore, we have transitioned key software resources to our SureSmile innovation team, who now focus on creating simplified product offerings, upgrading the user interface of the software, and reimagining the patient and customer experience. We expect some of these improvements to launch as early as mid-2025. Earlier this month, we also announced that we are exploring strategic alternatives for our well-specced healthcare business. We believe that taking this step can unlock significant value for our stakeholders. Over the last two years, we have invested very strategically in this business. We strengthened its foundation and positioned it for the future by prioritizing product innovation and profitable revenue growth and investing in capacity to meet anticipated demand growth. Importantly, we've developed a strong product pipeline with potential opportunities to access significant untapped markets in WellSPEC's core business and other adjacencies. Our added focus and attention to this business has resulted in attractive top-line growth and profitability. We look forward to determining an outcome for this evaluation process. As we said, The company is committed to maintaining a disciplined approach in regularly evaluating our portfolio, cost structure, investments, and additional pathways to drive sustainable, profitable growth. We have made meaningful progress on our transformational journey, completing key initiatives and milestones in 2024 with our plans and momentum continuing into 2025. I'll share a more detailed update on our foundational initiatives later, But before we move on, I want to reiterate that we remain highly committed to taking actions to reshape the organization, unlock efficiencies, enhance customer engagement, and strategically allocate spend with a return focus. We are confident that these steps will enable us to capitalize on the advantages that a broad-based dental organization has to offer. The financial contributions that we originally laid out for these initiatives during our 2023 Investor Day continue to remain on track. Now, before we discuss financial results in more detail, I'd like to share some recent business highlights on slide four, starting with operational updates. We announced our phase two transformation activities back in August. Action steps are now largely complete and on track to deliver full run rate savings by the end of 2025. We also announced in August that we were investing in a virtual sales team in the US with the expectation that the team would be stood up and calling customers in Q1 2025. The team is now fully staffed and has already made over 8,000 unique customer touchpoints to date. And as we've shared, we've completed the largest individual phase of our ERP deployment in the US, which went live on November 1st. This deployment also laid some of the important foundation needed for future phases. Moving to innovation, in Q4, we were pleased to complete the US launch of the MIS LYNX implant, part of our value implants offering. LYNX is a versatile, reliable choice for a wide range of clinical applications. It combines a thoughtful design with cost effectiveness, offering excellent value to clinicians and to patients alike. In 2024, we successfully received eight 510K clearances. This reflects the progress we have made in the execution of our new product development and regulatory processes. And we have already launched six out of eight of these innovations to market, including PrimeScan 2 and Lynx. With DS Core, we continue to drive adoption, surpassing over 37,000 unique users in Q4. representing approximately 15% growth sequentially. In September, we launched PrimeScan 2, and its link with DS Core represents further integration of our digital ecosystem. This integration provides our customers more flexibility and efficiency within their practice and enables a better patient experience, which all supports practice growth. As we've seen with other key functionality adds to DS Core, we saw a nice increase in subscriptions related to the PrimeScan 2 launch, which is powered by DS Core. Wrapping up our highlights, clinical education remains an important component of how we bring value to our customers. In 2024, we hosted thousands of training and education events across the globe, including six DS Worlds hosted in different locations with over 7,000 participants. And with that, I'll turn it over to Herman for the financial update.