Solventum Corporation

All right, good afternoon, everyone. I think this is the last. This session sits between now and cocktail hour, so hopefully this is very engaging for folks to keep everyone attentive. But I'll just remind everyone that these presentations are not open to the press. And with that, a welcome. I'm managing from Solventum. Very happy to have Wade McMillan, Chief Financial Officer, and Kareem Ansour, President of the Dental Solutions business. I think this is one of the first times you've been out at an investor conference, so a great opportunity to dive into one of the more significant businesses here at the company. Looking forward to that and appreciate your making the time. This presentation is being webcast. Happy to take questions from the audience to the extent to which there are any just Raise your hand and either we'll get a mic over to you or I'm happy to repeat questions so those participating virtually can hear as well. So maybe we just kind of start at a higher level. You had an analyst meeting in March at about, you know, a few months since then you've had an earnings call. Maybe just kind of give us your reflections on what are some of the messages that you think are resonating in your investor conversations and What are some of the things that people, you know, maybe present company included are, you know, might be missing from your perspective?

Yeah, sure. Great place to start, David, and good to see everybody here, and thanks for those joining online. I think the investor day went a long ways for us. You know, we've done a lot of work over the last year in hiring the leadership team. You know, at our first investor day, many were either new, including myself and Brian, new to the company or have been hired since the investor day. So we've been doing a lot of work on our strategy, and it was great to have our second Investor Day here recently to articulate that strategy. And I think it's becoming clearer and clearer to investors what the value creation story is, and the Investor Day went a long ways for that. And it's really prioritizing growth for us is a big change in the metrics, and we've articulated our growth driver strategy where 80% of our growth is going to come behind five growth drivers, and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about some of those today. We've got Kareem here as well. And then we're going to pair that with an exciting operating margin expansion story, which we think will be something that people are interested in as we look for efficiencies across the business, and we think we've got a lot of levers to do that as well. And then we're focused on free cash flow and improvements there as well. So we've got a lot of opportunity, you know, coming out of a separation, we had a great foundation, we've got great brands, got a great business, but we had a lot of work to do, and we've got a three-phase transformation, which we could probably talk about today as well. We've made great progress on the first phase, which is really resetting the mission, the talent, the structure for the company, and then getting into the second phase now around commercial productivity and innovation. I'm sure we'll probably get into that a little bit today as well. And then with the P&F divestiture that we announced, we're pretty excited about being able to de-lever a balance sheet faster than we had originally expected, and just to go on offense for M&A, which might be something else we might want to talk about today. We certainly have a lot going on.

Yeah, so a lot to dive into here. I think as we reflect on your period of time as a public company, even if we start with the analyst meeting in March of last year to 2024, to where we are today, There's been sort of an evolution in ebb and flow about how you and Brian have sort of talked about the business. We started with this sort of really dire sky is falling. We've got this spin, lots of complexity. Things go a lot better in 2024. Come into this year, start of the year, similar sort of like cautious tone, get to the analyst meeting, positive. Q1, good quarter, but it's transient. How do you think about it? Are you... focused on just trying to keep expectations in check and execute a beat and raise, or is your impression of the business really evolving at a pretty rapid pace?