Qiagen N.V.

Welcome and thank you for joining QIAGEN's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call webcast. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Please be advised that this call is being recorded at QIAGEN's request and will be made available on their internet site. The prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touch tone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. At this time, I would like to introduce your host, John Giliardi, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at QIAGEN. Please go ahead, sir.

So thank you very much and welcome all of you to our call. The speakers today are Terry Bernard, our chief executive officer, and Roland Sackers, our chief financial officer. Also joining us today is Phoebe Lowe from the IR team. Please note that this call is being webcast live and will be archived in the investor section of our website at www.kygen.com. Today we will first have some remarks from Terry and Roland and then move into the Q&A session. A presentation with details on our performance is available in the IR section of our website, along with the quarterly release that you saw earlier this week. We will not be showing slides during the call, but you have the slides from the website as a reference. Before we begin, let me cover as usual our safe harbor statement. This conference call discussion and responses to your questions reflect the views of management as of today, April 28, 2022. We will be making statements providing responses to your questions that state our intentions, beliefs, expectations, and predictions of the future. These constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Cajunist claims any intention or obligations to revise any forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and those are also available on our website. We will also be referring to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. All references to EPS refer to diluted EPS. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in the press release as well as the presentation. Again, these are both on our website. I'd like to now turn over the call to Terry.

Thank you, John, and welcome to our conference call today, and thank you once again to everyone for joining us. We are very pleased to report strong results in the first quarter of 2022, which exceeded our outlook and reflects a solid performance in our non-COVID products of 14% CER growth. In this current environment, This once again demonstrates the resilience of the portfolios of QIAGEM and the strength of our company, as well as the relevance of our strategy. Against the dynamic global situation, we have taken a very proactive approach to showing up our business. This has enabled us up to this point to effectively manage supply chains and keep production running to ensure delivery of our products. As the beginning of the year brought further economic uncertainty on a macro scale, our teams did an excellent job of staying focused. Something that we are very proud to highlight is the fact that upon Russia's invasion into Ukraine, Kayageners all over the world banded together in support of Ukrainians as our teams all over the world donated funds clothing and food, and even open their homes to those in need. During those unprecedented times, we see the true culture of QIAGEN with a dedication to taking care of one another while remaining disciplined towards execution of our goals. For that, I really would like to thank all our teams for their unwavering commitment. Now allow me to move to our key messages for today. First of all, we exceeded the outlook set for net sales growth and adjusted EPS for Q1 2022. Net sales for the first quarter of 2022 grew 15% at constant exchange rates to $628 million over the same period in 2021. This was well above the outlook for at least 7% growth CER. Our non-COVID product sales continued to deliver solid growth at 14% CER, which was ahead of our expectations. COVID-19 related product sales were also better than expected, driven mainly by surges of Omicron outbreaks in Europe. Adjusted earnings per share in the first quarter grew to 83 cents CER, which was above the outlook for at least 72 cents. Second key message. We had strong profitability and increased cash flow in the first quarter, which further reflects the strength of our business. Operating cash flow for the first quarter of 2022 rose 61% to $207 million, while free cash flow more than doubled to $178 million over the first quarter of 2021. Those results demonstrate our ability to support future growth through smart investments while managing a rapidly increasing changing cost environment. As a last message, we have increased our outlook for the full year 2022 as a result of our performance in the first quarter. Although we are in a time of international economic uncertainty, we feel optimistic that our strategy is robust and execution by our teams is on track. Therefore, we now expect sales of at least $2.12 billion for the full year 2022, to be mainly driven by double-digit CER growth coming from our non-COVID portfolio. And as for EPS, we now expect at least $2.14 CER for adjusted EPS. We remain focused on advancing our non-COVID product groups, and we are still taking a conservative view on COVID-19 testing demand for the year. Of course, as always, we will remain ready to support COVID testing as needed in case of any outbreaks in the future. We will provide more details on the outlook later in this call, and I would like now to hand over to Roland, for our financial update.