Haemonetics Corporation

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2024 Humanetics Corporation's earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Olga Gayet, Senior Director, Investor Relations, Treasury. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Humanetics' first quarter fiscal 24 conference call and webcast. I'm joined today by Chris Simon, our CEO, and James Durecka, our CFO. This morning, we posted our first quarter fiscal 24 results to our Investor Relations website, along with our updated fiscal 24 guidance. Before we begin, just a quick reminder that all revenue growth rates discussed today are organic and exclude the impact of currency fluctuation. We'll also refer to other non-GAAP financial measures to help investors understand Humanetics' ongoing business performance. Please note that these measures exclude certain charges and income items. For a full list of excluded items, reconciliations to our GAAP results, and comparisons with the prior year periods, please refer to our first quarter fiscal 24 earnings release available on our website. Our remarks today include forward-looking statements, and our actual results may differ materially from anticipated results. Factors that may cause our results to differ include those referenced in the safe harbor statement in today's release and in our other SSE filings. We do not undertake an obligation to update this forward-looking statement. And now I'd like to turn it over to Chris.

Thanks, Olga. Good morning and thank you all for joining. Today we reported first quarter organic revenue growth of 21% and adjusted earnings per diluted share of $1.05, 81% growth over prior year. It was a particularly strong start to the year. with market-leading performance across our businesses, delivering revenue growth and adjusted operating margin expansion, while advancing meaningful innovation and commercial milestones. Our Operational Excellence Program improves productivity and strengthens risk management, enabling us to fulfill customers' demands, expand our margins, and invest in opportunities for further growth and value creation. We are pleased that Diane Bryant has joined Humanetics Board of Directors. She brings more than 30 years of leadership experience with top global technology organizations, including Google, Intel, and NovaSignal. We welcome her counsel and expertise in technology solutions and healthcare information management. Turning now to our business unit results, plasma revenue grew 35% in the first quarter. North America disposables grew 41%. disproportionately driven by strong momentum in U.S. collections and price. Additionally, our first quarter plasma revenue growth rate benefited from unfavorable order timing in the first quarter of fiscal 23. In the U.S., this was the seventh consecutive quarter of volume growth exceeding historical seasonality. We also saw strong high single-digit collections growth in Europe. Our Nexus plasma collection system stands apart for offering 9% to 12% additional plasma yield, impeccable safety, connectivity, and a superior donor experience backed by real-world evidence from tens of millions of collections. We are bringing powerful innovation with FDA clearance of a redesigned bowl and the Express Plus software to shorten average collection time, optimize plasma center efficiency, and reduce cost per liter. This technology is expected to enable an average procedure time of 33 to 38 minutes, approximately a 20% reduction from the current procedure times on the Nexus PCS system. This is additive to the existing 16-minute reduction in door-to-door time, with a significant portion of this improvement occurring pre- and post-procedure, enabled by the seamless bidirectional communication between the Nexus PCS device and our NextLink DMS software. The launch of these new enhancements has been met with great enthusiasm from customers and we are working with them on a timely rollout while ensuring no interruption to plasma center operations. We are encouraged by our first quarter results and we are well positioned to capitalize on positive macroeconomic trends that support rising collection volumes. We are increasing our full year plasma organic revenue growth guidance from 3% to 6%, up to 8% to 11%. Moving to hospital, revenue increased 14% in the first quarter. North America performance was particularly strong, supported by improved procedure volume and staffing levels at US hospitals. Vascular closure revenue grew 27% in the first quarter, with a disproportionate contribution from new account openings, both in electrophysiology and interventional cardiology. We also continue to see higher utilization rates driven by our clinical efforts and increased procedure volumes in U.S. hospitals. Commercial efforts remain focused on increasing our share of the approximately $2.5 billion global TAM. We are making significant progress establishing our leadership in the top 600 U.S. EP hospitals responsible for nearly 90% of procedures. International expansion is on track and this quarter we received approval for Vascaid MVP in Japan and initiated clinical use of our vascular closure products in key accounts in Germany and Italy. The early feedback is very positive and confirms the important role our products play in improving the standards of care. Hemostasis management grew 14% in the quarter. North America, our largest market, grew 23%, driven by increased utilization of TEG, benefits from pricing, and strong capital sales. International growth was mixed, but all of our key markets in Europe delivered strong double-digit growth in the quarter. Strong performance in transfusion management was driven by market share gains in North America and Europe with the help of our recent agreement with EPIC, to offer SafeTrace TX to their global network of hospital customers. Cell salvage also had a strong quarter in North America as we capitalized on increased utilization in U.S. hospitals. These benefits were more than offset by unfavorable order timing among distributors outside the U.S. We are pleased with hospital's performance. We are ahead of schedule on our regulatory and commercial milestones and capitalizing on improving trends in hospitals worldwide to drive additional growth. With the launch of our vascular closure products in Europe and Japan, we are establishing new foundations for growth in the coming years. We affirm our fiscal 24 organic revenue growth guidance in the range of 16% to 18%. Blood center revenue grew 6% in the first quarter. Apheresis revenue grew 7%, driven by strong collections, particularly in plasma, coupled with favorable order timing among distributors. Capital was down slightly due to prior year share gains in Egypt as we partnered with a global plasma customer to expand a network of collection centers with Nexus PCS devices. Whole blood revenue grew 4% in the quarter as we benefited from the opportunity to serve competitors' customers in need. We are pleased with the first quarter results of our blood center business. However, near term we face a difficult external environment a voluntary product recall in our whole blood business, and the timing of some commercial opportunities that may take longer to realize. We now anticipate an organic revenue decline of minus two to minus 6% compared with our previous guidance of zero to minus 2%. In summary, momentum continues to build as we increase contribution and scale of higher growth, higher margin products, We are delivering sustained transformational growth and advancing our market leadership. Accordingly, we are raising our fiscal 2024 total company organic revenue growth guidance from 5% to 8% up to 7% to 10%. I'll now turn the call over to James to discuss the rest of our fiscal first quarter results and FY24 guidance. James? Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone.