Alcon Inc.

and welcome to Alcon's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. If 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. Please go ahead.

Welcome to Alcon's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued a press release, interim financial report, and form 20F, and posted a supplemental slide presentation on 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 NALCON's Form 20F and our 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. 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 measures 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 measures presented in accordance with IFRS. For discussion purposes, our comments on growth are expressed in constant currency. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to David.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Alcon's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. Despite operating in the extraordinary circumstance of a global healthcare crisis in 2020, we did make significant progress on our strategic initiatives and delivered innovative products that enabled us to grow our market shares. Let me begin by recapping highlights from 2020 and recent months, including market dynamics and our strategic priorities. After my comments, Tim will discuss the fourth quarter and full-year performance. We'll provide some color on 2021. Then I'll wrap it up with some closing remarks and we'll open the call for Q&A. Now looking back on 2020, I'm proud of what Alcon has accomplished against a difficult background. We exited the year with fourth quarter sales of 1.9 billion in line with 2019 levels, which is a result of both recovering markets and strong execution. Both our businesses saw a rebound from the low point of the second quarter and exited the year by returning to growth in the fourth quarter. Our core operating margin came in at 14.9% for the quarter. Despite the impact of COVID-19 on our operating results and continued capital investments and separation costs, we generated $350 million of free cash flow for the year. From the beginning of the pandemic, our first priority has been the safety and wellbeing of our associates. To protect them, we implemented a response framework with recommended COVID-19 prevention, containment, and mitigation measures. We also kept our associates fully employed through the pandemic and maintained pay levels, notwithstanding lower production and sales volumes. Despite the impacts of the pandemic, we are still on track to substantially complete our separation by the end of the first quarter. We're looking forward to channeling more energy towards creating greater value for our customers and shareholders. Our ongoing transformation program continues to enable a more agile culture defined by greater accountability and ownership. We're making progress in optimizing our cost structure, which is also allowing us to reinvest cost savings into research and development and marketing to drive our top lines. We're continuing to advance our new contact lens manufacturing platform all through the pandemic. And over the last several years, we've been in the process of adding capacity to enable new product development of daily SIGHI contact lenses, Torex, multifocals, and other modalities. These new lines are now producing precision one in our recently launched precision one for astigmatism. And finally, we remain laser focused on our customers and their patients. Notwithstanding the challenges of 2020, we built an exciting pipeline with 11 first in market launches last year. which further expands our long-term runway for growth. Now let me spend a few minutes updating you on some of our key products. Panoptix, our trifocal IOL, continues to be the market leader and a favorite of surgeons and patients in some of our largest markets. Following its successful launch last year, Alcon accounts for more than 75% of the U.S. PCI well market. We also recently launched Panoptix in China, where surgeon reception has been positive. While Panoptix wrapped around its launch anniversary in the U.S. and Japan in the second half of 2020, given its market share ramp, the recovery of the market, and other regional opportunities, we anticipate continued steady share growth in the coming years. Now moving to Vividi, the world's first non-diffractive extended depth-of-focus lens. Vividi offers excellent distance and intermediate vision, but also gives nearly half of the patients benefit of near vision. all without the visual disturbances typical of diffractive ATIOLs. Vividi launched in Europe during the fourth quarter in 2020 and in the United States last month. We've received very positive feedback and are seeing surgeons using Vividi who would not have previously considered using ATIOL for certain patients. So we believe a lens like Vividi has the potential to expand our audience for ATIOLs as well as upgrade their experience. Turning to Precision 1, our newest daily SIHI contact lens. Precision 1 has become the fastest-growing daily disposable contact lens in the United States and Alcon's leading brand in terms of new and switch fits in the fourth quarter. We're building on this momentum by introducing Precision 1 for astigmatism, which launched in select U.S. accounts during the fourth quarter and also began a wider national rollout in January. We received terrific feedback from eye care professionals on the lens, settling time, rotation on blink, and first-time fit success rate, all very important characteristics for a toric lens. We also launched Precision One Sphere and TORIC concurrently in Europe this quarter. Studies show that approximately 40% of patients are astigmatic, but only 10% wear TORIC contact lenses. With the launch of Precision One TORIC, Alcon now provides a comprehensive daily PSI-HI offering across Sphere, TORIC, and multifocal contact lenses that could treat nearly all patients. Our SIHI contact lenses continue to take share in sphere and multifocal categories globally, and we're confident we can make significant inroads into the daily SIHI toric category as we ramp up precision one for astigmatism. Finally, in ocular health, Pataday continues to bolster our leadership in the over-the-counter market. We were pleased to introduce Pataday Once Daily Extra Strength to national retailers last month. The eyedrop, formerly prescribed as Paseo, is our strongest solution, offering a full 24 hours of relief. This expands our over-the-counter ocular allergy portfolio to meet a variety of patient needs in advance of the spring allergy season. Recently, we also introduced a multi-dose preservative-free offering for Sustain in the U.S. and also in select European markets, which extends Sustain's runway for growth in previously untapped preservative-free markets. Turning now to our markets, in surgical, the trend for global cataract procedures continues to improve sequentially, and was down mid-single digits in the quarter, with North America nearly back to 2019 volumes and international markets continuing to lag 2019. Although COVID cases began to increase again in the fall, we did not see the magnitude of OR closures we saw in the second quarter, and so we continued to see some improvement through the end of the year. In vision care, the global contact lens market increased about 4% in the fourth quarter versus the same period last year. However, the increase in the Japanese consumption tax implemented in Q4 of 2019 is creating some noise with the quarterly growth rates. So excluding the Japanese market, Contact Lens market growth would have been in the low single digits based on our estimates. In summary, I'm pleased with the results of our key products and our underlying performance. Our ability to take share in a difficult market is a testament to our innovation and commercial execution. And it's critical to our ability to outpace the market. As we intensify our focus following the completion of our separation activities, we're confident in our ability to win share in the marketplace. With that, let me pass it to Tim. We'll take you through our financial results and provide some commentary on 2021. Thanks, David.