IQVIA Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IQVIA fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Nick Childs, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Mr. Childs, you may begin your conference.

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. With me today are Ari Goosby, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ron Brooman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Sherbert, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Mike Fedock, Senior Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis, and Brian Stengel, Associate Director, Investor Relations. Today, we will be referencing a presentation that will be visible during this call for those of you on our webcast. This presentation will also be available following this call in the events and presentation section of our IQVIA investor relations website at ir.iqvia.com. Before we begin, I would like to caution listeners that certain information discussed by management during this conference call will include forward-looking statements. Actual results will differ materially from those stated or implied by forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with the company's business, which are discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings. we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call, which should be considered a supplement to, and not a substitute for, financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP measures is included in the press release and conference call presentation. I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Ari Uzbe.

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today for our fourth quarter results. It was great to see many of you in person at our Analyst and Investor Conference in November. And as you will recall, we shared our expectations that we would meet or exceed our three-year Vision 22 targets. We also laid out our plans to make 2022 yet another inflection point in our growth trajectory, and further accelerate the company's growth rate in the next three-year phase of our journey to 2025. The team highlighted the power of connected intelligence, which brings together IQVS differentiated capabilities and drives our leadership position in the clinical and commercial markets. This underpins our new 20 by 25 strategy, which alludes to our plans to achieve at least $20 billion of revenue by 2025. We're excited about this next phase of growth for IQVIA, and we are busy refining our strategies and action plans, and you will hear more about it as the year progresses. Two weeks ago, IQVIA was named to Fortune's list of the world's most admired companies for the fifth consecutive year. Importantly, we earned a first-place ranking within the healthcare, pharmacy, and other services category for the first time. We ranked number one in the categories of innovation, capital deployment, global competitiveness, quality of product and services, and long-term investment value. I want to thank our nearly 80,000 employees worldwide, for this recognition is a tribute to their innovation and drive. Turning now to our results, we ended 2021 on a high note, despite COVID-19's continued impact on many parts of the world. We delivered robust top and bottom line growth in the quarter, which, as you know, was against a much tougher year-over-year comparison than earlier in the year. These results reinforce our confidence that we will achieve our 2022 guidance, and, of course, it sets us up well to meet our ambitious 20 by 25 targets. Let's review the fourth quarter. Revenue for the fourth quarter grew 10.2% on a reported basis and 11.6% at constant currency. The $62 million beat above the midpoint of our guidance range was driven by stronger operational performance across all three segments, as well as higher pass-throughs, partially offset by FX headwinds. Compared to prior year and excluding COVID-related work, our core businesses, meaning RMDS and TAS, grew mid-teens at constant currency on an organic basis. Ron will provide a lot more detail in his remarks, including additional COVID-adjusted numbers for each segment. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA grew 12.7%, reflecting our revenue growth, as well as ongoing productivity initiatives. The $27 million debt above the midpoint of our guidance range was entirely due to our operational performance. Fourth quarter adjusted diluted EPS of $2.55 grew 20.9%. That was 13 cents above the midpoint of our guidance, with the majority of the BIT coming from the adjusted EBITDA drop-through. Let me now provide an update on the business. On the commercial side of the business, it was a strong year for new molecules and launches as the industry continued its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic disruption. This year, 15 new molecules were approved by the FDA and 72 new commercial launches took place. IQVS supported nearly 80% of launchers by top 20 pharma and approximately 60% of all launchers. This highlights our scale globally and across all customer segments in applying advanced technology and analytics capabilities to enhance launch planning, engagement, and measurement. Overall, We've seen significant momentum and continued demand for our technology solutions. There are now over 3000 clients who have adopted one or more of our technology platforms, including human data science cloud, orchestrated analytics, E360, omni-channel navigator, Engage, and of course, orchestrated customer engagement or OCE. In fact, The footprint of our OCE platform itself has continued to grow, with over 350 clients having adopted one or more modules on the platform since launch. Early in 2021, we launched IQVIA Next Best Action, which is an AI-driven, omnichannel customer engagement decision engine. Two top 20 pharma clients have successfully rolled out this intelligence engine to orchestrate customer engagements in over 30 countries and across more than 40 brands each. Two other top 20 pharma are currently in the implementation phase. Another highlight in our task business has been the success of DMD Marketing Solutions, a leading provider of data and digital marketing solutions that help brands deliver personalized digital content to healthcare professionals. we entered into an enterprise agreement with the top 10 pharma clients to utilize DMD's advanced analytic capabilities to power omnichannel engagement across all eight of their brand franchises. To date, 18 of the top 20 have adopted at least one of DMD's solutions. We're very excited for the future growth of this business within IQVIA. Real-world evidence, another highlight IQVIA continues to play a leading role in the use of secondary data to answer key questions for life science customers. In the fourth quarter, we want two large post-authorization safety studies in an autoimmune area with a top 10 pharma. These studies use existing healthcare data to observe patients over a period of 10 years to better understand long-term effects of the treatments. We were also recently awarded a disease registry project for an upcoming novel gene therapy. Here, we will recruit a broad population of patients with a specific disease to understand how they are currently managing clinical practice. This information is vital to our life science sponsors to inform the design of subsequent clinical trials so they can target patient groups with the highest unmet need. Moving to clinical technology, we saw increased adoption of our orchestrated clinical trial, OCT platform, which supports trial planning, site management, patient engagement, trial management, and clinical data analytics. During the year, we added 90 new oct clients bringing the total to over 350 clients who have adopted one or more modules within our clinical technology suite since launch including all of the top 10 and 18 of the top 40. within oct's digital patient suite this year we secured three preferred provider partnerships We talked 30 pharmaceutical clients to provide our interactive response technology, IRT capabilities, to support site operations across their entire clinical trial portfolios. This technology facilitates patient randomization to ensure protocol adherence and streamlines site supply chain management to reduce drug wastage and to drive significant cost reductions. our solution was awarded a top ranking by industry leaders in a recent ISR report for randomization and trial supply management capabilities. We also saw increased demand for our industry-leading decentralized clinical trial offering. Approximately one-third of our active full-service clinical trials incorporate one or more of our DCT technology or services capabilities, and we expect these to continue to grow as the need for these capabilities in complex studies becomes more evident. For example, we are currently executing a full-service trial for treatment of multiple system atrophy, a severe degenerative neurological disorder affecting the body's involuntary functions. We are deploying a full suite of capabilities, including e-coa, e-consent, and home research nurses on this study to significantly reduce the travel burden on these patients who have significant mobility challenges. Finally, our overall RNDS business continues to build on its strong momentum with over $2.4 billion of net new business, including pass-throughs, and it set a record for quarterly service bookings achieving over $1.9 billion of service bookings for the first time ever. This resulted in a fourth-quarter contracted net book-to-be ratio of 1.36, excluding pass-throughs, and 1.24, including pass-throughs. For the calendar year, we delivered over $10 billion of total net new bookings for the first time ever, an increase of 14.6% compared to 2020. This led to an LTM contracted net book-to-bill ratio of 1.35% excluding pass-throughs and 1.34% including pass-throughs. Our contracted backlog in RMDS, including pass-throughs, grew 10.2% year-over-year, to a record $24.8 billion as of December 31, 2021. And now I will turn it over to Ron for more details on our financial performance.