Cencora, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the AmeriSource Bergen Q4 FY2022 earnings call. My name is Glen and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask questions during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star 1 on the telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Bernard Murphy, to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us for this conference call to discuss AmerisourceBergen's fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and full year results. I am Bennett Murphy, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Joining me today are Steve Collins, Chairman and President and CEO, and Jim Cleary, Executive Vice President and CFO. On today's call, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to GAAP are provided in today's press release, which is available on our website at investor.amerisourcebergen.com. We have posted a slide presentation to accompany today's press release on our investor website. During this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements about our business and financial expectations on an adjusted, non-GAAP basis, including but not limited to EPS, operating income, and income taxes. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and change. For discussion of key risks and assumptions, we refer you to today's press release and our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K. AmerisourceBergen assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, and this call cannot be broadcast without the express permission of the company. If you have an opportunity to ask questions after today's remarks by management, we ask that you limit your questions to one per participant in order for us to get to as many participants as possible within the hour. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Bennett. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call. Today, my remarks will focus on the successes of our 2022 fiscal year and the ways in which our leading distribution and pharmaceutical solution capabilities are core to advancing global pharmaceutical innovation and access, ultimately driving significant value creation for all our stakeholders. Amerisource Bergen delivered another strong fiscal year driven by the resilience and strength of our business as our team continued to execute to advance our strategic priorities and build on our foundation for future growth. First, we leverage the strengths of our leading pharmaceutical distribution businesses. During fiscal 2022, we were proud to continue to support the continued global response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the exclusive distributor of emergency use authorization treatments in the U.S. and by supporting the distribution of vaccines and test kits internationally. Guided by our purpose and empowered by our commercial strengths and execution, we played an important role in supporting public health. This also presented an opportunity to enhance relationships with key stakeholders worldwide, including governments, public health agencies, and providers and pharmacies. Importantly, we also continue to support our community provider customers, from pharmacies to physicians to veterinarians. all of whom are integral to ensuring patient access and care in our communities around the world. Second, we solidified our global capabilities to further enhance our customer experience. In the nearly 18 months since our acquisition of Alliance Healthcare, we have continued to integrate the business and facilitate collaboration across teams. As we look forward to the next phase of our integration, We are focused on streamlining our solutions under one commercial leader. Group President Bob Mausch will now also oversee Alliance Healthcare and assume the role of Chief Operating Officer. By uniting and simplifying our commercial operations, we will engage with our partners as a truly integrated healthcare solutions leader, fortifying our position at the core of the global pharmaceutical supply chain. Third, we advance our legacy of responsible corporate stewardship with our ESG commitments, engagement, and reporting, including further aligning our ESG work with recognized international standards, frameworks, and initiatives. One important area where we continue to evolve our programs and policies is in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And as a sign of progress, I'm pleased to say that our most recent gender pay data in the United States indicates that for every dollar male employees are paid, female employees in Amerisource Bergen are paid 99.8 cents, an increase from our previous ratio of 99.4 cents. Furthermore, to extend our work in DEI, we are making important investments to support health equity in our community. These efforts include our Disparities in Cancer Care Task Force, which is focused on addressing disparities and analyzing social determinants of health for oncology patients at the community level. In August, we held our first ever Disparities in Cancer Care Summit, where we brought together researchers, community physicians, patient advocates, payers, and healthcare leaders to collaborate and share information. By uniting thought leaders and industry leaders, we hope to stimulate innovative partnerships that will address the disparities in cancer care today. We also focused on supporting our people, Based on feedback we have solicited from our team members, we have evolved our workforce policies to address post-pandemic labor trends, reinforce the strengths of our culture, invested in our talent, and aligned their development with our goals for the business. We recognize that our people are our most important asset and that the strength of our performance is thanks to the tremendous efforts of our team members around the globe. With purpose-driven dedication, commitment and expertise, our teams are executing against our strategic pillars to maintain a leading share of pharmaceutical distribution and best in class efficiency while growing our higher margin and higher growth businesses. Looking to the year ahead and beyond, we have strong momentum and the importance of pharmaceutical care and the opportunities provided by continued pharmaceutical innovation bolster our strategy and fortify our ability to create additional stakeholder value. To advance our foundational pharmaceutical distribution business, we lead with market leaders around the world. It's no coincidence that customers are our first strategic pillar because they are at the center of everything we do. Our key anchor customers range from upstream emerging biotechs and large pharma manufacturers to downstream providers across the spectrum of care delivery. including physicians, community and specialty pharmacies, health systems, veterinarians, and government agencies. We form long-term strategic partnerships to solve for the current and future need of our customers. And with our expanded footprint and capabilities, we are now able to partner with them on a truly global scale. This includes supporting them with a technologically advanced and standard-setting infrastructure. For a distributor, maintaining infrastructure his table stakes. And we are proud that our historical investments have enabled us to be a leader in adopting new technologies and innovations to fulfill our purpose of being united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. In particular, our footprint, efficiency, and capabilities in data and analytics have enabled us to support the COVID-19 pandemic response globally. Today, we are proud to be supporting the response to monkeypox, and we stand ready to facilitate patient access to life-changing and life-sustaining medication to advance public health around the world. To ensure future readiness, AmerisourceBergen is enhancing our capabilities to grow our higher margin, higher growth businesses to support the rapidly evolving and global nature of pharmaceutical innovation at the center of which is specialty medical care. Our team members, customers, suppliers, and investors have known and appreciated Amerisource Bergen as a leader in specialty. Our specialty business is nearly 30 years old, and the tremendous investments we've made in our specialty capabilities have helped build us into the leader we are today and have laid a strong foundation for us to lead in the specialty of the future. Cell and gene therapies, for example, is one area with a combination of scientific breakthroughs regulatory support, and industry developments are accelerating product pipelines and patient access. To support this cutting-edge innovation in patient care, we deploy our broad and expanding platform of capabilities in distribution, commercialization, and specialty logistics. This includes assets such as WorldCareer, Alloga, and Inamar, which we are able to leverage to provide pharma manufacturers with the expertise needed to solve their most complex problems now and plan for the solutions of tomorrow. Specialty medicines play a key role in future pharmaceutical innovation, and with our continued innovation investments, we further strengthen our leadership and capture this growth opportunity. Amerisource Bergen is also well-positioned to benefit from high and increasing demand for outsourced manufactured consulting and logistics services, as we solidify our role as partner of choice for global pharmaceutical manufacturers. Through our various investments and partnerships, we offer a differentiated portfolio of commercialization solutions to support pharmaceutical innovation. Our recently announced acquisition of PharmaLex, for example, enhances our portfolio of solutions across our footprint and represents our ability to support clients at every stage of the commercialization journey. from providing market access strategies and early-stage clinical development consulting services to leveraging our pharmaceutical distribution reach and specialty distribution leadership to bring innovative products to market. We are differentiating and getting closer to our pharma partners by expanding our solution set, advancing our core capabilities, and leveraging our existing commercial strengths, ultimately contributing positive pharmaceutical outcomes. We further drive our differentiation by investing in innovation to both advance our foundation and enhance our capabilities. Our investment strategy prioritizes continually improving and building on our strengths, supporting customer needs, and ensuring our continued leadership in core capabilities such as supply chain excellence, clinical practice efficiency, and patient access and adherence. We are also next-minded and focused on areas where we see trends leading to future growth, such as clinical trial service, digital commerce, and home health. In clinical trial services, for example, we continue to play a leading role with direct to patient capabilities, helping our customers manage complexities as they increasingly adopt decentralized and hybrid models. Through this capability, we leverage our capabilities and reach to support pharmaceutical innovation and facilitate patient access. And to create the next generation of solutions to power our success long into the future, we continuously innovate through a combination of internal investments, capability building, strategic partnerships, and venture capital. We remain committed to creating differentiated value for our stakeholders. Our long-term sustainable growth is supported by investments in our people and culture and our commitment to ESG. Our people drive our business forward, and we are committed to investing in and supporting them with a culture that unites, cultivates, and empowers them. Underpinned by our purpose and guiding principles, we are advancing our talent and culture to support our strategy and innovation to create an energized, diverse, and inclusive workplace. It helps our talent to be action-biased, creatively resourceful, and next-minded. Our business is supported by the right people, including at the top of the organization. We recently had the pleasure of welcoming to our board of directors Dr. Lawrence Kim, whose business acumen and knowledge of healthcare and pharmaceutical innovation will serve Amerisource Bergen well in his new capacity as an independent director. We are focused on adding key skill sets and diverse perspectives to help support our business and strategy as we continue our process of board succession planning. Just as we invest in our people, we also invest in our communities, which have grown in scale and geography. With this in mind, we continue to evolve our environmental, social and governance initiatives to create healthier futures around the world, which includes adapting to a changing climate, promoting health equity and embracing a culture of transparency, ethics, and integrity. We take very seriously our leading role in healthcare, and we are committed to being a sustainable and responsible business. We are pleased with the progress we are making towards our long-term vision of expanding our leadership in pharmaceutical distribution and growing our higher margin, higher growth businesses. We have the right strategy in place to do so by advancing our foundation, enhancing our capabilities, and investing in innovation to further drive our differentiation, we are solidifying our position at the core of global pharmaceutical innovation and access. Our leadership and growth are further supported by a strong financial foundation and value enhancing capital allocation strategy, which Jim will discuss shortly. Just as importantly, we live our purposes of being united in our responsibility to create healthier futures with a focus on creating a better future for all of our stakeholders. Now, I will turn the call over to Jim for a more in-depth review of our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results and to discuss our expectations for fiscal 2023. Jim?