West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 West Pharmaceutical Services Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star and zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Quentin Lai, Vice President of Investor Relations, and please go ahead.

Thank you, DeeDee. Good morning, and welcome to West's first quarter 2022 conference call. We issued our financial results this morning, and the release has been posted in the investor section on the company's website located at westpharma.com. This morning, CEO Eric Green and CFO Bernard Burkett will review our financial results, provide an update on our business, and present an update on our financial outlook for the full year of 2022. There's a slide presentation that accompanies today's call, and a copy of that presentation is available on the investor section of our website. On slide four is our safe harbor statement. Statements made by management on this call and in the accompanying presentation contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. federal securities law. These statements are based on our beliefs and assumptions, current expectations, estimates, and forecasts. Future results are influenced by many factors beyond the control of the company. Actual results could differ materially from past results, as well as those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statement made here. please refer to today's press release as well as any other disclosures made by the company regarding the risk to which it is subject, including our 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K reports. During today's call, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures, including organic sales growth, adjusted operating profit, adjusted operating profit margin, and adjusted diluted EPS. Reconciliations and limitations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable financial results prepared in conformity to GAAP are provided in this morning's earnings release. I now turn the call over to West CEO and President Eric Green. Eric?

Thank you, Quinton, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We will start on slide five. I'm pleased to report that we delivered a strong first quarter. This is driven by double-digit organic sales growth with increasing demand for our high-value products. Our confirmed order book for the rest of 2022 and into 2023 remains as strong as ever, primarily driven by non-COVID-based business. And to provide you more color, over half of the order book is coming from biologics demand. These results were delivered despite several macroeconomic challenges that are impacting all companies and sectors. We have taken proactive measures to mitigate the risk of these challenges and ensure the continuity of critical components to our customers. For example, Inflation. We're adjusting our pricing strategy and have enacted surcharges as a pass-through to offset increasing costs of raw materials, energy, and transportation. Supply chain. Our raw material and proprietary medical device components are sourced from across the globe. We have increased our inventory of these key raw materials to minimize any supply disruption. And we continue to execute and monitor our business continuity plans with respect to these issues, including the war in Ukraine and the recent pandemic surge in China. Turning to slide six. Our team members across the globe continue to demonstrate their passion to improve patient lives as they remain focused on our strategic initiatives of execute, innovate, and grow. Starting with the first pillar of execute, we continue to deliver the key drivers of growth in Q1 with strong customer demand of HPVP components, including NovaPeer and Westar. There was solid demand in the quarter across all market units, and a positive outlook remains for the rest of the year. And in particular, for our biologics market segment, which is now greater than 42% of our total sales, we see both existing and new customers continue to spec our highest level of components by West or our partner, Dykeo, for their sensitive molecules. Our capital spending investments through expansions and optimizing productivity across our global operations remain on track. To date, almost all of our 2020 expansion phases have been installed, validated, and in production. And we're making good progress on the 2021 capital expansion plans, some of which will come online in the second half of 2022 and throughout 2023. With the accelerated biologics demand for NovaPeer, we have executed additional support for NovaPeer future demand as well as other HPP finishing capabilities. Expansion construction is underway and will be online towards the back half of this year with commercial production in 2023. Shifting to West's team of scientific and technical experts, we continue to educate and share insights in biologics, combination products, and container closure integrity, which are priority areas in pharmaceutical packaging. At the recent PDA Annual Meeting, several of our West experts were recipients of prestigious awards. Now to innovate. We need to fuel innovation to develop future products, solutions, and services that connect the dots across science and technology to create customer value. We're doing so by investing in external opportunities that complement our current business needs, such as our partnership with Tech-In to create a research center of excellence in combination with West's scientific expertise. the Corning Collaboration as we expand our HVP value proposition to lead the industry from components to a truly integrated system of elastomer and glass, and building technologies like the recent collaboration with NUMA Systems to develop a family of fluid flow technologies for drug delivery. I'm pleased on the progress our R&D team is making around Innovate. Moving to the final pillar, grow, which includes uses of cash. We're working from a position of strength as we believe we have a long horizon of continued strong organic sales growth and margin expansion. As we have demonstrated over the past two years, we have increased our capital spending for capacity expansion at existing sites across our global network to support our organic growth initiatives. In addition, we have made inorganic investments, such as partnerships with Corning. Our continued focus within these three strategic pillars, execute, innovate, and grow, allows us to be more responsive, leverage our assets more effectively, and support the trends that are happening in the industry today. This was most evident from my recent site visits in Dublin and Waterford, Ireland. For example, in Dublin, I saw firsthand how the digitalization of our manufacturing technologies is providing real-time data, enabling our team to raise the bar in operational performance with higher yields and efficiencies. At Waterford, the capital investments over the last year and a half have significantly increased capacity with additional lines producing HVP product to meet increased demand. And we're seeing early success with our next generation fully integrated automation that we believe will scale and transfer across the network for a combined benefit of higher quality production and higher manufacturing throughput. Lastly, and proudly, the hard work of our Waterford team was acknowledged by the Ireland U.S. Council as we received the Global Public Service Award for our commitment during the pandemic. Now I'll turn it over to our CFO, Bernard Burkett, who will provide more detail on our financial performance.