Alcon Inc.

and welcome to the Alcon's first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Karen King, SVP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Welcome to Alcon's first quarter earnings conference call. Earlier, we issued a press release and interim financial report and posted a supplemental slide presentation to our website to enhance today's call. You can find all of these documents in the investor relations section of our website at www.investor.alcon.com. Joining me on today's call are David Endicott, our Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Stonecipher, our Chief Financial Officer. Our press release, presentation, and discussion will include forward-looking statements. We expressly disclaim any obligation to update forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future developments, except as required by law. Our actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in our forward-looking statements are included in ALCON's Form 20F, Earnings Press Release, and Interim Financial Report on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Included in this press release are selected non-IFRS measures. Non-IFRS financial measures used by the company may be calculated differently from, and therefore may not be comparable to, similarly titled measures used by other companies. These non-IFRS financial measures should be considered along with, but not as alternatives to, the operating performance as prescribed per IFRS. Please review the financial tables provided in the press release and our filings that reconcile non-IFRS measures to directly comparable financial measures presented in accordance with IFRS. For discussion purposes, our comments on growth will be expressed in constant currency. With that, I'll now turn the call over to David.

Thanks, Karen. Hello, everybody. I hope you are all staying healthy and safe in these challenging times, and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the many sacrifices people are making every day to express our gratitude to all the healthcare professionals on the front lines serving their communities. As Alcon navigates through this situation, our number one priority is to keep our associates safe while managing a complex supply chain that serves critical eye care needs in 140 countries. Since the emergence of COVID-19, our crisis management team has been coordinating our global response to this healthcare crisis. I want to recognize that team and the thousands of associates in our manufacturing plants, warehouses, and distribution centers who are helping us maintain an uninterrupted flow of products to the patients who need them most. Most of our office-based associates are working from home, and we've implemented new procedures and measures to enhance safety at all of our sites. Let me also acknowledge the many associates who volunteered to apply their time and ingenuity in making much-needed protective supplies such as hand sanitizer and splash guards for our local communities. Now, that being said, I'll start by providing a brief update of our first quarter, recent performance, and overall market dynamics. And then Tim will discuss our sales performance by business and provide additional color on April results and our outlook for recovery. And then I'll wrap it up with closing comments and open up for Q&A. In the first quarter, we delivered sales growth of 4% and core operating margin of 16.6%, including an unfavorable impact of 50 basis points from foreign currency. Core earnings were 45 cents per share with 4 cents of interest expense from financial debt. Overall, we saw double-digit growth in implantables driven by strong demand for panoptics, and we saw double-digit growth in ocular health driven by continued demand for Sustane, plus the successful launch of Pataday in the U.S. This overall growth was offset by the impact of the pandemic on our end markets. Now, turning to those end markets, in insurgical, global cataract procedures declined in the high single digits this quarter, after a mid-single-digit increase in the fourth quarter of 2019. First quarter market data shows us gaining another 10 share points in the U.S. PCIOL category, putting our share over 65%. We're very pleased with the early success of Panoptix as evidenced by the rapid increase in market share, and we look forward to continuing that momentum of this innovative product as markets reopen. In vision care, the contact lens market was relatively flat in the first quarter versus up low single digits in fourth quarter 2019. The fast-growing part of the market is daily SIHI, which continues to see strong growth at 22%. We continue to gain share in this market on the strength of DT1, DT1 multifocal, and and our newly launched PrecisionOne. And in ocular health, we gained close to 10 share points in the quarter due to the contribution of Pataday, putting us in a strong leadership position with over 40% of the US OTC ocular allergy market. We're pleased with the launch of Pataday and attribute its initial success to wide product availability, brand recognition, and solid commercial execution, despite retailer disruptions due to COVID-19. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has had a substantial impact on our health system, and the need for urgent care requires the prioritization of critical hospital resources for acute care. What this means for our business is that with the exception of emergency procedures, surgeries were either suspended or significantly restricted in most major markets around the globe. At the end of February, we were feeling very good about the quarter. Panoptix was gaining share in the PCIL market. PrecisionOne and Vividi were both off to a great start and gaining momentum. And we just launched Pataday OTC. So we ended February with strong global sales. However, as surgery restrictions were enacted in most of our markets and optometry clinics closed, COVID-19 began to negatively impact the demand for our products and quarterly results really by mid-March. It's important to remember that cataracts don't get better. So instead, they progress and vision deteriorates over time, which may compromise the ability of patients to live independently. As such, we're confident that there will be a solid rebound, albeit at different speeds in our markets, depending on the healthcare system, the mix of public versus private facilities, the capacity to ramp up surgeries, and importantly, patient confidence in returning to a healthcare facility. In vision care, our contact lens business also showed signs of slowing in late March as many independent ODs reduced working hours, closed clinics, or moved to telemedicine to support their existing customers, which means new fits have substantially slowed. In addition, channel mix shifted towards online consumption during the quarter. Ocular health products, such as sustain and contact lens care, however, benefited initially from the preemptive stocking of OTC products by both retailers and consumers concerned about the availability of future supply. This, coupled with strong demand for Pataday, resulted in the double-digit growth for vision care during the quarter. As we face these new challenges, we're taking decisive actions so that we can weather the storm and be positioned to advance our long-term initiatives. So what are we doing? Well, we're spending significant time with our customers on virtual training and education through the Alcon Experience Academy, local webinars, and peer-to-peer forums. To date, we've conducted more than 650 training sessions, reaching approximately 50,000 customers in just about every market we serve. We're supporting our customers with measures such as credit extensions and mailing contact lenses directly to consumers. We're refining our launch calendar as we believe product innovation will play an important role in helping doctors rebuild their practice. In surgical, we're off to a great start with panoptics as evidenced by our double-digit growth in implantables in the first quarter, and we'll continue to roll out the product in the U.S. and Japan. We received positive early feedback from our limited launch of Vividi and will broaden our launch access in Europe. And we will pilot Vividi with select KOLs in the U.S. later this year. In VisionCare, we're increasingly engaging our customers online through digital channels and supporting the robust demand at owned and third-party e-commerce platforms with inventory and new direct-to-consumer models. Feedback for PrecisionOne has been favorable, and we're prepared to re-energize promotional activities as optometrists reopen their doors. We're also excited to expand our TORIC daily portfolio with the introduction of PrecisionOne and daily TotalsOne TORIC lenses later this year or early into next year. We're moving forward with our contact lens manufacturing expansion in both Germany and Singapore, and have used this downtime to build inventory of some of our key products as we prepare to rebuild our momentum post-crisis. We're also implementing significant cost control measures while staying on course with our separation, transformation, and other investment priorities. And we're taking a number of steps to preserve financial flexibility, and Tim will discuss these actions in detail in his comments. Lastly, because we believe these conditions are transitory, we're not making structural changes to our operational costs that would impede our ability to fully ramp up when all geographic markets recover. Now, before I turn the call over to Tim, I want to step back for a moment and just add a little bit of long-term perspective. iCare is a large and growing market, and we've defined it as a $25 billion market, which has historically grown at around 4% to 5%, driven by an aging population, improved access to care, and the explosion of myopia. Eye care is incredibly important, principally because 80% of what we perceive is through the eyes. Cataracts don't go away or improve on their own, and while most patients can delay surgery for some period of time, an uncorrected cataract will pose health risks, compromise mobility, and ultimately lead to blindness. In addition, myopia is accelerating at an alarming rate. Children are spending less time playing and exercising outdoor, which is believed to be an important factor in developing distance vision. People are spending more time on their handheld devices, and by 2050, current projections show that half the world will be nearsighted. So while there's definitively some short-term challenges to work through, keep in mind that the long-term fundamentals remain strong. We're the leader in these large and growing markets, and we'll continue to innovate for our customers' and patients' needs. And with that, I'll turn it over to Tim, who will review our financial results and provide more color on our outlook.