Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Rob, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agilent Technologies Inc. fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. Pramit Ahuja, you may begin your conference.

Thank you and welcome everyone to Agilent's conference call for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024. I'm sure you've seen our press release earlier today regarding our new market focused organizational structure, which we will talk about in more detail. These changes have no impact on our company's consolidated financial statements. All financial metrics and guidance during this call will be shared under our historical structure. we will provide recast historical segment information to reflect these changes ahead of our upcoming investor day. Now on to our quarterly results. With me are Porek McDonald, Agilent President and CEO, and Bob McMahon, Agilent Senior Vice President and CFO. Joining in the Q&A will be Phil Binns, President of the former Life Sciences and Applied Markets Group, Simon May, President of the newly formed Life Sciences and Diagnostic Markets Group, and Angelica Reimann, President of the expanded Agilent CrossLab Group. Also joining the call is Mike Zhang, President of the newly formed Applied Markets Group. This presentation is being webcast live. The news release for our fourth quarter financial results, investor presentation, and information to supplement today's discussion. along with the recording of this webcast are available on our website at www.investor.agilent.com. Today's comments will refer to non-GAAP financial measures. You will find the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations on our website. Unless otherwise noted, all references to increases or decreases in financial metrics are year-over-year And references to revenue growth are on a core basis. Core revenue growth excludes the impact of currency and any acquisitions and divestitures completed within the past 12 months. Guidance is based on forecasted exchange rates. During this call, we will also make forward looking statements about the financial performance of the company. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties and are only valid as of today. The company assumes no obligation to update them. Please look at the company's recent SEC filings for a more complete picture of our risk and other factors. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Porek.

Great. Thank you, Parmeet. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. Before I begin, I would like to welcome new AMG President Mike Zhang. While Mike is new to this role, he is not new to Agilent. Mike joined Agilent more than 20 years ago as a manufacturing engineer in China, and most recently was vice president and general manager of the GC and GCMS business within our former life sciences and applied markets group. With his broad experience in both manufacturing and in the business, Mike will be an incredible asset in this role. I'm very much looking forward to him moving AMG and Agilent forward. I also want to take a moment to wish Phil Binns a wonderful retirement in advance of him leaving Agilent. Phil joined Agilent with the Varian acquisition in 2010. All told, Phil is celebrating just over 40 years of service with Agilent and Varian. Although Phil is retiring from the business president role, he has graciously agreed to serve as a special advisor through April 2025. All of us at Agilent wish Phil the very best and look forward to working with him during the last five months at Agilent. Now onto our high-level Q4 results. I'm happy to share not only our solid fourth quarter results that point to continued steady market recovery, but also our outlook on drivers for 2025 fiscal year. I am especially excited to talk about Agilent's customer-first strategy evolution and our aggressive transformation ambition that led to the news you read ahead of the call. a new market-focused organizational structure to become a nimbler, even more customer-centric company to accelerate our performance. In the fourth quarter, the Agilent team delivered revenue of $1.701 billion, roughly 1% reported growth with a flat core growth. This represents a sequential improvement of over 400 basis points from Q3. In addition, our total company book-to-bill was greater than 1%. This points to a steady market improvement we're seeing and we expect it to continue in 2025. We also gain share in all our geographies, evidence that even in challenging CapEx environment, customers trust Agilent. As we evolve, we are confident this will only accelerate. Bob will provide deeper details on our Q4 results and our outlook for Q1 and FY25. Now I'd like to spend some time talking about our new organizational structure we announced earlier today. Our new market-focused organizational structure is a result of our customer-centric market-first strategy and an important step in our organizational transformation work, which we have named Ignite. This is a product of our enterprise-focused strategy that drives our evolution to become a nimbler, even more customer-centric company to accelerate our performance. The new market-focused organization structure is one of the most significant changes Agilent has seen in a decade and continues the work we did creating our commercial organization three years ago. The commercial organization doubled down on our customer-first approach in the field and is a critical competitive advantage in supporting our customers. At that time, we started by creating a singular commercial leadership structure We then created a foundational infrastructure and intensified our focus on digital capabilities, accelerated an end-to-end customer experience, and ensured sales channels were customer and market-centric. So, the changes you see today are part of the successful journey we started three years ago. With the new structure, we are aligning business units to our markets, facilitating close collaboration among the businesses like never before, and enabling better execution and cross-division customer first priorities. We are combining the strengths of our three businesses, as well as our portfolios, so that we can offer end-to-end solutions and workflows that revolve around our customers and markets. The Life Sciences and Diagnostics Markets Groups, or LDG, represents $2.5 billion in annual revenue, and it's primarily focused on our pharma, biopharma, and clinical diagnostics end markets. LDG provides a comprehensive portfolio of leading technology platforms and solutions to serve Agilent's customers' value chain, including research and discovery, development and scale-up, production of therapeutics, and development of critical cancer diagnostics. LDG includes LC and LC-MS, cell analysis, as well as CDMO capabilities, which include NASD and BioVectra. The business also includes pathology, companion diagnostics, and genomics. simon may will serve as president of ldg prior to joining agilent earlier this year simon was executive vice president and president of life science group at biorad laboratories the applied markets group or amg represents 1.3 billion dollars in annual revenue and is focused on food environmental forensics chemicals and advanced materials markets amg includes gc and gcms spectroscopy, vacuum technology platforms, and certified pre-owned business. AMG will focus on growing Agilent's strong leadership in these markets and accelerating growth in new areas of the market. Mike Chang, a 22-year veteran of Agilent, has been promoted to president of AMG. Most recently, Mike was vice president and general manager of our GC and GCMS product lines. And the Agilent CrossLab Group, or ACG, represents $2.7 billion in annual revenue and is focused on supporting our customers in all our end markets. The group is uniquely positioned to leverage its comprehensive portfolio and capabilities to further enhance the install base of instruments with targeted workflows and applications that drive critical outcomes and productivity in labs. ACG includes services, software, and informatics, automation and consumables. This business will accelerate and strengthen customer relationships across all end markets. Angelica Ryman, a 25-year veteran of Agilent, will continue to serve as president of ACG. Prior to her current role, she served as vice president and general manager of the ACG services business. This change is one of the many that demonstrate how we're becoming nimbler and accelerating the pace of innovation. And you can see that with the Q4 launch of the exciting Agilent Infinity Tree LC series that harnesses our 50 years of LC expertise and leadership. The Infinity Tree series has advanced automation that simplifies our customers' daily routines and is compatible with the previous generations, which allows for seamless upgrades and technology refreshes. And Agilent Infinity Lab LC solutions are certified by MyGreenLab. These instruments optimize lab space and they reduce water, solvent, and energy consumption while also minimizing waste. While just launched in October, early traction from customers has been very positive. Also in Q4, we closed our acquisition of BioVectra, demonstrating our commitment to providing customers the most advanced capabilities to accelerate their therapeutic programs. With BioVectra now being part of Agilent, we expand our portfolio of CDMO services beyond our market-leading oligonucleotide production at NASD. We're adding more rapidly growing therapeutic modalities like peptide synthesis, a market expected to continue to expand rapidly over the coming years, and bringing world-class capability support gene editing therapies. Just last month my leadership team and I visited BioVectra to welcome our new team members to Agilent and we became even more exhilarated by the capabilities we would be able to harness. Plus both Agilent and BioVectra's focus on putting customers first and accelerating the pace of innovation so we can add to and capitalize on opportunities was abundantly clear as I spoke to dozens of BioVectra employees. Separately, during the quarter, we hit another important milestone. For the full year, we passed the $1 billion mark in digital orders for the first time across the company. This is a result of our investment in our digital ecosystem to ensure our customers can do business with us in ways that meet their needs. To reinforce what I've stated in previous calls, we're sharply focused on key growth factors such as biopharma, PFAS, and advanced materials. and the Agilent team is mobilized to accelerate value creation through our Ignite transformation program. The objective of Ignite is to drive revenue growth and margin expansion by increasing our execution capabilities. The world is moving faster than ever, and so are we. That's exactly why we introduced our new market-focused organizational structure. We are laser-focused on winning in the marketplace and adding value to our customers and shareholders. We will dive more deeply into these details, including our evolved strategy and the Ignite transformation that will help us execute on that strategy at our investor day on December 17th in New York. Bob would now provide the details of the results, as well as our outlook for the fiscal year of 2025 and the first quarter. After Bob delivers his comments, I will be back for some closing remarks. Over to you, Bob.