ZimVie Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to ZimV's first quarter 2022 earning conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star, then zero on your telephone keypad. We will be felicitating a question and answer session towards the end of today's call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Marissa from Gilmartin Group Investor Relations for a few introductory comments. Please go ahead.

Thank you all for joining today's call. Joining me are Vassa Jamali, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Rich Happenstall, Chief Financial Officer of Zimbi. Earlier today, Zimbi released financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website, cindy.com, as well as on sec.gov. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make comments during this call that include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statement due to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the company's 2021 Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties. Additionally, the discussion on this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included within the earnings release and or the investor deck issued today found on the investor relations section of the company's website, zimd.com. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 5, 2022. ZIMB disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to Vassa Jamali, President and Chief Executive Officer of ZIMB.

Thank you, Marissa. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. for our first earnings call as an independent public company. My name is Dafa Jamali, and I'm honored to serve as the president and CEO of Zimvi. I'm on the call today with Rich Happenstall, our chief financial officer, and I believe I speak on behalf of our entire leadership team in saying that we're very excited to be here as a standalone business following our spinoff of Zero Biomet on March 1st, 2022. I'd like to kick off our call by introducing who we are at Zimvi, including our dental and spine businesses and the opportunities, and then reviewing our recent financial performance. Before I dive in, I want to thank all of our employees for their efforts made towards our spinoff to become an independent company. Despite COVID-related macro trends that both disrupted our employees, our end users, and created a very difficult hiring period, our team was able to stand up this new organization and begin our turnaround. As a reminder, Zimbi is a global medical technology leader dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of dental and spine patients. And we participate in a $20 billion global market opportunity across these markets. We are the number five largest player in the worldwide dental market and the number six in spine. We have over 20 brands trusted by clinicians and surgeons worldwide. We operate in 70 plus countries and we have approximately 2,700 team members. Our vision is that everyone deserves to feel better, healthier, and stronger. Our mission is to advance clinical technology foundation restoring daily life, and we offer dental and spine solutions that do exactly that, enabling our patients to better enjoy and experience life. Our team shares a growth mindset that gives us the energy and the inspiration we need to do more for those patients. As I mentioned earlier, we have the fortune of being a leading player in two substantial and growing markets. Our product platforms address a broad set of critical patient needs, across those markets and are substantially differentiated from competitive solutions in several cases. Our dental business is very well positioned in the growing global dental implant and biomaterials markets. Within this segment, we operate in three key categories. Dental implant solutions, which is our largest contributor. Biomaterials, which support the durability and sustainability of the implant. And digital dentistry. which is an emerging technology that provides significant workflow to support to the clinician across their office and derivatively both improves the quality of the implant while reducing the time that a patient spends in the chair. As we scale our digital dentistry solutions, we're also driving strong pull through of our implant business. Our spine business comprises of a broad portfolio addressing all areas of the market. Within spine, our largest category is core and complex solutions, followed by bone healing. We also have exposure to two exciting emerging categories, minimally invasive surgery, which typically requires some sort of an enabling technology to be effective, and is an area we intend to grow into. And motion preservation devices, an area we're actively leading and remain very excited about. This category includes the MOVIC, the market-leading cervical disc replacement, as well as the Tether, a novel treatment for pediatric scoliosis. The opportunity here is to transition more patients from fusion to one of these two modalities. These are great market development opportunities requiring substantial clinical selling, which we believe we can leverage to our advantage. The breadth of our portfolio and our strong market positioning are a function of our rich history. Looking forward, we intend to maintain our breadth to address a broad diversity of patient conditions while optimizing our exposure to the highest growth segments and continuing to evolve our solutions to best meet patient and provider needs. As part of that, we're committed to ongoing innovation in both these segments. We have approximately 300 in-house R&D employees across dental and spine. Much of this team has contributed to some of the best innovations in the past, and we are excited to have this team continue their journey with Zimbi as we look to bring new technologies to market for the benefit of patients going forward. Turning to our strategic objectives as a standalone entity. At this stage of our independence, it's important to share the progress we're making towards our long-term priorities to define and accelerate our growth drivers while expanding our operating margin. We have developed a strategic framework that will shape our priorities and direct our approach towards investment supporting sustainable growth and value creation for Zimbi. The intention of our margin expansion plans are to provide the fuel necessary to drive our growth aspirations. We are focused on three strategic factors. stability and separation from Zimmer Biomet, operational excellence, and portfolio optimization. Stabilizing the business and separating from the remaining arrangements with Zimmer Biomet remains a critical short-term priority. Our team has been hired with no major vacancies remaining. The team is now staffed with the right people, with the right attitudes, and the right jobs. We're continuing to make progress separating our OUS, our outside of U.S. spine business, and setting up our regional infrastructure, largely utilizing the existing outside of U.S. dental back office infrastructure. A major short-term priority here is consolidated and upgrading our ERP platform and distribution centers across the globe. These transitions have been completed in the U.S. and Canada and underway in Asia Pacific and Europe. These transitions are critical to building an efficient and connected global business infrastructure to execute on our operational objectives going forward. Completion of these projects will also resolve the majority of our transition service agreements with Zimmer Viament. Operational excellence is our second critical vector. I'm also pleased to share that we've kicked off our operational excellence plan designed to improve our overall profitability through the next several years. We are aggressively examining our cost structure in terms of how we do business, both for manufacturing and operations, as well as commercial and corporate infrastructure. Initially, we exited unprofitable geographies and implemented a brand rationalization program. These efforts will have a small negative impact on spine revenues for 2022, but no impact on profit, and will improve our focus, our profit, and our future prospects. I'm confident that we have multiple opportunities to take costs out of our business without impacting patient care, nor impacting our growth and ambitions. Finally, with respect to portfolio optimization, we have implemented disciplined portfolio management. Here, we run a deep analysis of our portfolio of initiatives. We then streamline our focus of top projects that are in the best markets while eliminating time-consuming and low-return projects. As a result, we will allocate investments based on the ability to drive innovation. Specific to Spine, we started aligning our U.S. channel to our most important business priorities and adjusted financial incentives accordingly. We have clearly communicated what's expected and are now moving into more directional performance management. So how are we doing up to now? First, I'd like to reiterate that it remains very early days for Zimby. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to announce that we recognize $234.7 million in total revenue for the quarter, declining modestly year over year, but offering a baseline against where we're confident we can grow over time. Rich, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide greater detail on our first quarter financial performance shortly. But before I turn it over to Rich, let me briefly detail the impact of a pandemic on our recent performance and financial outlook. In the first quarter, our dental business was largely immune to pandemic-related disruption of the clinician's set of care, and we saw strong, high single-digit constant currency growth, as which we'll detail shortly. However, our spine business has periodically been affected by COVID-related hospital slowdowns, most recently in China. Spine procedure volumes across the market did improve over the course of the first quarter, and we have continued to see moderate improvement through our call today, although some challenges in inpatient procedures, such as staffing shortages, remain. Into the remainder of the year, as we transition from pandemic to endemic, we are hopeful that the US healthcare system will remain resilient against further variants, and business conditions, particularly for our spine business, will continue to improve. Perhaps more importantly, we have a chance to identify several operating model improvements driven by lessons we learned from the pandemic. Internally, we have learned how to operate remotely and more efficiently when needed. Externally, we have learned how and where customers have flexibility to adapt and where they still face substantial need. For example, we saw our dental customers adjust quite quickly to pandemic results, pandemic restraints by increasing their use of PPE and adapting their office setups to keep seeing patients. We saw similar trends within Spine, albeit later in the pandemic, but providing takeaways for us on how we can continue to evolve and meet the greatest needs of providers and patients through our people and our platforms. I'll now hand the line over to Rich Happenstall, our Chief Financial Officer, to review more details of the first quarter performance outlook.

Thanks, Vapa, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin by reviewing our first quarter 2022 results, and we'll then close by providing some additional thoughts on our outlook for the full year 2022. Beginning with sales, total third-party net sales for the first quarter of 2022 were $234.7 million, a decrease of 4.6% on a reported basis and 2.7% in constant currency when compared to the prior year period. Please note, our total first quarter net sales were impacted by one less selling day than the first quarter of 2021, worth approximately 1.6% to growth. Shifting to our segments. Global Dental's third-party net sales were $120.6 million, representing a 6.4% increase on a reported basis and a 9.2% increase in constant currency when compared to the prior year period. This includes the 160 basis point headwind from one less selling day in Q1 of 2022. We continue to gain traction on our strategy of leveraging a strong foundation in medical education and our digital dentistry and biomaterials offerings to pull through impact sales. Geographically within dental, US third-party net sales of $68.3 million increased by 8.2% and outside of the U.S. sales of $52.2 million, increased by 4% and 10.5% on an as-reported and constant currency basis, respectively. Moving on to SPINE. Global SPINE's third-party net sales were $114.1 million in the first quarter of 2022, a 13.9% decrease on a reported basis and a 12.9% decrease in constant currency when compared to the prior year period. The decrease in spine sales is driven by the exit of certain unprofitable markets in late 2021, the discontinuation of products as part of our brand rationalization program and distributor bulk orders in the first quarter of 2021 that did not recur. When adjusting for these items and taking into account one less selling day, Spine sales decreased by 9.5% and 8.4% on a reported and constant currency basis, respectively. Our underlying performance in Spine was impacted by ongoing competition and challenges associated with COVID-19. Turning now to profitability. Adjusted growth profit was $149.3 million compared to $165.9 million in the prior year period. Adjusted growth margin was 63.6%, a decrease of 380 basis points when compared to 67.4% in the prior year period. The year-over-year decline is due to reduced volume and higher excess and obsolete inventory expenses in spine. Adjusted research and development expenses as a percentage of third party sales were 5.9% versus 5.3% in the prior year period in line with our expectations. Adjusted selling general and administrative expenses of $116.2 million or 49.5% of third party sales reflects a reduction of $10.3 million or 190 basis points when compared to the prior year period due to lower variable selling expenses and timing delays of cost to incur stand-up activities for Zimby as an independent public company. Adjusted EBITDA of $33.8 million or 14.4% of third-party sales reflects a decrease of 180 basis points from 16.2% in the prior year period. The year-over-year decline was due to lower sales and higher excess and obsolete inventory expenses in the spine segment, partially offset by higher dental segment sales and timing delays of costs to continue to stand up Zinvi as an independent public company. Adjusted earnings per share was 50 cents on a fully diluted weighted average share count of 26.1 million shares. Quickly touching on liquidity, we ended the first quarter with approximately $104 million of cash and equivalents, including approximately $22 million of cash earmarked to settle certain post-spin related transactions and to fund ERP implementations to decouple from our prior parent company. Netting those earmarked funds, we ended the quarter with a healthy cash balance of approximately $82 million. I will now provide some additional color on our full year 2022 outlook. We are reaffirming our full year 2022 guidance of $1 billion in third-party sales, adjusted EBITDA margin of 13.1% to 13.6%, and adjusted earnings per share of $2.10 to $2.30 per share. However, we now expect our dental segment to grow in the mid to high single digits compared to the mid single digit growth previously guided. And we also expect the spine segment to contract in the mid to high single digits compared to contracting in the mid single digits as previously guided. Our adjusted earnings per share guidance remains unchanged at $2.10 to $2.30 per share. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Bapa.

Thank you, Rich. We've seen incredible opportunity to revitalize exciting aspects of our portfolio with the greatest clinical impact for providers and patients in the dental and spine markets. Overall, I am very encouraged by our progress made towards free cash flow generation and our margin expansion programs at this early stage. We're in the very early innings of an exciting opportunity. With that, I want to thank you for your time and open it up for any questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from the line of Matt Mixick with Credit. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions, and congrats on a pretty strong quarter here in Q1. So I wanted to ask just one question. Maybe following up on the comments you were just making around sort of spine trends, and I had one follow-up. So things kind of, as you know, I'm sure, sort of, you know, recovered a little bit faster in Q1 in terms of volumes and staffing and all the things we've heard about throughout Q1 earnings for the group. your numbers were a little bit light and you've taken down your full year expectations a little bit. And I'm just wondering how much of that is dynamic in respect to geographies or end markets that you're in? And, you know, how much of that is, you know, shifting expectations for some of the key growth drivers that you've laid out, namely around Tether and around MoVC?

Thanks for the question, Matt. Vafa here. So we have a mix there. So we do have some impact from exiting some geographies that undoubtedly affects the 2022 We have some brand rationalization as well. But within Spine, we really do think that we need to give the portfolio some time for really some commercial fixes that we think are fixable within 2022. But unlike Dental, where we got a bit of a head start in terms of turning that one, within Spine, we still think there's some commercial fixes for us to do. It doesn't push back or change any of our thesis with regards to our growth drivers. But it does require us to take a little bit more active management of some of the commercial decisions we've made and some of the execution that we've done in Q1 and for the rest of 2022. Okay.

That's helpful. And just to follow up on margins. You know, key big theme we've heard a lot about this quarter, as I'm sure you know, is rising input costs. You mentioned a little bit about that in your prepared remarks. You're holding full year sales guidance expectations and EBITDA margin. Just wondering if you could help us understand kind of the ebbs and flows or puts and takes to how you're handling some of the – if you're seeing and how you're handling some of the same rising costs or expected rising costs throughout this year in wages and energy, et cetera.

Sure. Rich, why don't you take that one?

Yeah. Hey, Matt. Good to talk to you again. Yeah, so with regard to cost increases, we have seen some marginal cost increases in In particular, like you mentioned in labor, many of those cost increases that we actually saw, we actually saw toward the back part of 2021. And so those were kind of embedded in our underlying guidance. You know, we're obviously seeing some impacts to freight relative to largely to dental and then some other minimal impact of raw material price increases. The good news is on those material price increases, Most of our products are outsourced manufacturing on the spine side. And so we're pushing back with suppliers and negotiating cost increases accordingly. And then most of our manufacturing on the dental side is largely insourced, as you know. And one of the things that we've got a really distinct advantage on the dental side is much of our raw material pricing is in fixed contracts. that do not permit price increases through, I think it's 2023. And to a certain degree, we're insulated from any material cost increases, you know, on the dental side. The way that we're thinking about gross margin in total at this point is, you know, we feel as though we have enough opportunity to optimize our cost structure and take costs out of the manufacturing process. that will offset more than offset any further prices increases that we're seeing or inflationary increases we're seeing from supply chain.

That's great. Thanks so much.

You're welcome.

Thanks, Matt. Thank you. At this time, we do not have any more questions. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Wafaa Jamali, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Again, it's the very, very early stages of our turnaround. We undoubtedly look forward to more of these with even more exciting news of our progress. So thanks very much for tuning in, and we look forward to updating you on our future progress. Thanks, everyone.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.