IQVIA Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IQVIA second quarter 2022 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 this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd 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. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our second quarter 2022 earnings call. With me today are Ari Boosby, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ron Bruman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Sherbet, 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. Statements. Actual results could 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. In addition, 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 Uzi.

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. IQVIA delivered strong financial results this quarter despite the dynamics of the broader macro environment and the various global geopolitical issues. Let me address a few of the key ones. Some of you have continued to ask about the impact of biotech funding on the cro industry as we have said on several occasions the recent decline in biotech funding has not had any significant impact on our business our exposure to pre-commercial edps remains at just over 10 of our backlog we have not seen an impact on bookings or rfps nor any increase in cancellations or delays in clinical trial work from the slowdown in biotech funding. Actually, RFP dollars from the overall EBP client segment continue to grow double digits in the fall. In China, the government-imposed COVID lockdowns had a modest impact on our second quarter results, mostly from disruptions to our clinical and laboratory operations. Our commercial business was virtually unaffected. Our experience in managing through prior lockdowns during the pandemic has been helpful in minimizing the operational impacts on site closures. Our guidance assumes that modest impacts from COVID-related lockdowns in China will continue through the end of the third quarter. In Ukraine, we continue to work with sites and sponsors to ensure the safety of our employees and patients while working to mitigate trial disruptions caused by the ongoing crisis. In Russia, we continue to conduct trials currently underway to ensure the safety of patients already enrolled in clinical trials, but we are moving recruitment on new trials to other countries. The financial impacts of the Russia-Ukraine crisis are tracking in line with the expectations we communicated back in April. More generally, we are of course monitoring, as are you, the possibility of a recession. I would just note that over the past 20 years, IQVF, along with the broader CRO industry, has shown resilience to economic downturns. During recessionary times over the past two decades, annual S&P 500 revenue contracted by as much as 10%. While IQVIA's clinical business and the CRO industry as a whole never experienced a year of revenue decline, the resilience of the CRO industry likely reflects the long-cycle nature of our business, as well as, of course, the mission-critical importance of clinical research and, more generally, the defensive nature of healthcare. With that as background, let's review the second quarter. Revenue for the second quarter grew 3% on a reported basis and 7.1% at constant currency. The $46 million beat above the midpoint of our guidance range was primarily driven by the timing of pass-through revenues versus our expectations, as well as some operational upside. Compared to last year and excluding COVID-related work from both periods, our base businesses grew 16% at constant currency on an organic basis. Ron will provide additional detail in his remarks, including COVID-adjusted numbers for each of our segments. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA increased 10.8%, reflecting our strong revenue growth and ongoing cost management discipline. Second quarter adjusted diluted EPS of $2.44 grew 14.6%, driven entirely by our adjusted EBITDA growth. Let me provide some more update and color on the business in the course. The continued strong performance at IQVIA is driven by our highly differentiated capabilities. As you know, the key differentiator for us in the clinical and commercial spaces is IQVIA's connected intelligence. Let me give you a few examples of how IQVIA's applications here help our clients solve their most complex problems. IQVIA's AI-driven Next Best Action platform helps our clients integrate multiple data sources, transforming raw data into personalized recommendations to sales, marketing, and medical personnel, which of course leads to deeper relationships with healthcare providers. In the quarter, a top 10 pharma client chose IQVIA's solution to completely transform their omnichannel commercial engagement model and to improve their go-to-market efficiency across multiple brands in eight countries by up to 30%. Another example in the quarter, we were selected by a top 20 pharma client to optimize the delivery of brand content directly to healthcare providers for one of their respiratory brands. Our solution here connects digital and field sales channels to deliver highly personalized content that results in high-quality, seamless brand experience for healthcare providers. This will improve this client's digital engagement metrics by three and a half times. Another area where demand has been growing is pharmacovigilance. Our platform here combines a unique catalogue of over 500,000 safety-specific terms and patterns with natural language processing to mine vast amounts of online data and to identify potential adverse events. In the quarter, another top 10 pharma clients selected our solution to reduce the risk of non-compliance and to increase data accuracy, ultimately improving their efficiency by up to 75%. Beyond large pharma, our commercial solutions are also resonating with EBP clients, especially when they decide to commercialize their assets on their own following approval. For example, in the quarter, We contracted with a leading EDP client to implement and manage their entire end-to-end commercial information management and to support their patient engagement and access programs. This includes data provisioning, master data management, and data modeling. Our ability to offer these services on a fully integrated platform will allow for a more streamlined implementation, generating savings of up to 20%, versus multi-vendor solutions. As you know, IQVIA continues to be the global leader in real-world evidence. In the quarter, a top 10 pharma awarded IQVIA a major project in medical affairs. The project leverages our AI and ML capabilities to provide near real-time disease insights across five different therapeutic areas. These insights will help identify misdiagnosis and suboptimal treatments, which will improve patient outcomes. As you know, our ECOA, or Electronic Clinical Outcomes Assessment Platform, has won multiple awards for its breakthrough patient engagement innovations. The product includes a library of over 1,500 pre-built clinical outcome assessments which enables sponsors to deploy assessments to patients after 14 weeks sooner than competitors' offerings. This efficiency reduces risks to study startup timelines and allows our clients to capture more feedback from patients, ultimately amplifying the patient's voice real-time. A top-five sponsor recently engaged IQVIA to couple this e-coop platform with our patient randomization tool so that we eliminate redundant full workflows, improve data accuracy and patient compliance, thereby reducing site onboarding activities by an estimated 50%. Finally, in the overall R&DS business, we continued our strong momentum, delivering over $2.6 billion of total net new business in the quarter, including pass-throughs. The services bookings also remained at the historic high we have seen recently of over $1.9 billion. This resulted in a second quarter contracted net book-to-bill ratio of 1.34, including pass-throughs, and 1.32, excluding pass-throughs. Over the last 12 months, our contracted net book-to-bill ratio was 1.32, both including and excluding pass-throughs. As you can see, there continues to be strong positive momentum across the business and an unprecedented level of engagement with our clients across our portfolio of commercial and clinical businesses despite the broader environment. I will now turn it over to Ron for more details on our financial performance.