Alcon Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Alcon first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listening 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. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Karen King, Head of Corporate Affairs and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Welcome to Alcon's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued a press release, an interim financial report, 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 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 OutCon'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 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 in 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 see a reconciliation between our non-IFRS measures with directly comparable measures presented in accordance with IFRS in our public filings. For discussion purposes, our comments on growth are expressed in constant currency. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to David.

Welcome to Alcon's first quarter 2021 earnings call. Let me begin by providing a brief update of our first quarter, overall market dynamics, and recent performance. After my comments, Tim will discuss our first quarter performance and our outlook for the full year 2021. Then I'll wrap up with some closing remarks and we'll open the call for Q&A. We started out the year with solid results in line with the expectations we shared during our last earnings call. We delivered sales growth of 2% and core operating margin of 18% despite continued impacts from the pandemic. Core earnings per share were better than expected at 49 cents. Overall, our surgical franchise continues to perform above market, benefiting from the strong growth in our latest advanced technology eye wells and strong demand for our equipment. In vision care, we saw high interest for our recent launch of Precision One Sphere and Toric and our newest allergy eye drop, Pataday Extra Strength. This was masked by a challenging year-over-year comparison due to the preemptive stock in the OTC products by U.S. retailers and consumers at the onset of the COVID pandemic. Assuming the prior year COVID-19 related forward purchasing estimate, the vision care first quarter sales would have been broadly in line with prior year. Now let me provide an update of our key initiatives. I'm proud to say that we've substantially completed our separation. This represents a major milestone in Alcon's journey as we intensify our focus on innovating products that delight our customers and create value for shareholders. We're also advancing our transformation program, which is optimizing our cost structure, increasing our investment in innovation and creating greater organizational agility. We also continue to expand our new contact lens manufacturing platform. Successful expansion increases our capacity and commercial agility as demonstrated by the successive rollout of Precision One Sphere and Precision One for Stigmatism. These lines also provide us with the flexibility to innovate new contact lens platforms such as Total 30 and other lenses. Let me now provide an update on our end markets. In surgical, cataract procedures remain down mid-single digits in the quarter, similar to the fourth quarter of 2020, with North America nearly back to 2019 volumes, but international markets continuing to lag 2019. We expect to see steady improvements as vaccines become more widely available across the globe. In vision care, the contact lens market was flat this quarter versus up 4% last quarter. We believe the noise and sequential growth rates was primarily caused by year-end purchasing of lenses. While optometrists are working with their existing patients to renew lenses, the new and switch fits have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. We are, however, gaining global share, driven by a strong U.S. performance. A fast-growing part of the market is daily Sci-Hi, which is growing at nearly 10%, and where Alcon is gaining share in all categories, especially daily Sci-Hi Tauric, with our new launch of Precision 1 for astigmatism. Strong commercial execution continues to fuel the global rollout of our new product launches. Starting with the strong contribution for both Panoptix and Vividi, this reinforces our market leadership with more than 50 share of the global PCIOL category. Panoptix, the only trifocal available in the U.S., continues to perform well across our launch markets, including China, where we began rolling out the product at the end of last year. Vividi, our breakthrough non-diffractive extended depth of focus lens, offers excellent distance with intermediate vision without the halos and glare typical of diffractive lenses. We've been pleased with the positive customer reception to Vividi. Together, Vividi and Panoptix provide surgeons with superior options to address the needs of a broad patient population. We believe ATL market penetration will benefit from our continued investment. In vision care, PrecisionOne, our newest daily sci-hi lens, is gaining momentum as we roll out the sphere and toric lenses across multiple geographic markets, with PrecisionOne for astigmatism in the U.S., the concurrent rollout of PrecisionOne sphere and toric in major European markets, and PrecisionOne sphere in Japan. Although it's early, initial reception has been strong from optometrists and patients alike. PrecisionOne remained our leading brand for new and switch fits this quarter. With our growing product options, we are converting and retaining more customers in the Alcon portfolio. We continue to gain share in the United States and expect to see similar progress in our international markets as we gain momentum on our Precision One rollout. As mentioned at our Capital Markets Day, we're bringing the proprietary surface chemistry used in our Daly's Total One lens to reusable wearers so they can enjoy the same incredible comfort. We're excited to announce that we've received FDA approval and CE mark for our latest reusable Saihai lens, Total 30, which we expect to launch in 2022. Total 30 represents an exciting opportunity in the $4 billion reusable lens market where our share is currently under-indexed. Lastly, new product introductions continue to expand our ocular health portfolio. Following the successful over-the-counter switch of Pataday once daily and twice daily last year, We introduced Pataday OneStay Extra Strength, our strongest allergy drop offering a full 24 hours of relief. We're seeing better than expected retail and consumer interest in Pataday Extra Strength, which will continue to benefit from several years of patent protection. In DryEye, we launched Sustained Hydration Multidose Preservative Free last week, which is our first multidose preservative-free product in the United States. The U.S. market for artificial tears is around 700 million, of which the fastest-growing preservative-free category is approximately 25%, compared to over 50% in the international markets. We believe that by continuing to add new innovation in the U.S., we could significantly increase preservative-free penetration. We also announced a new agreement last week to acquire exclusive U.S. commercialization rights to Simbrinza from Novartis. Simbrinza is a pharmaceutical eye drop indicated for the reduction of elevated intraocular pressure in patients with open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. This is a product that our management team launched in 2017 and currently manufactured for Novartis. We know this product well, and we see significant value in building a new U.S. commercial team focused on 10,000 U.S. eye care professionals promoting prescription Simbrinza and helping to develop the preservative-free multidose eye drop market. Initially, that will be led by sustained hydration multidose preservative-free. So we feel good about how we started the year. We participate in attractive markets. We're entering familiar white space aligned with our focus on delivering innovative eye care products, and we see solid growth returning. And with that, let me pass it to Tim, who will take you through our financial results and provide our outlook on 2021. Thanks, David.