Siemens Healthineers Adr

Please stand by, we are about to begin. Please stand by, we are about to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Siemens Healthineers Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the safe harbor statement on page two of the Siemens Healthineers presentation. This conference call may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the company's current expectations and certain assumptions and are therefore subject to certain risks and uncertainties. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Mark Kubanek, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. I'd like to thank each one of you for joining us today. At 7 a.m. this morning, we published our Q4 results and all the related materials of today's results release. They are available on our IR section of the Siemens Health and Years webpage. In a moment, we'll hear directly from our CEO, Bernd Montag, and CFO Johann Schmitz, who will walk us through this quarter's results and provide insights on the past quarter, our outlook, and on our growth prospects. After the presentation, we will open the floor for a Q&A session. To ensure everyone gets an opportunity to engage, we kindly ask that each participant limit themselves to maximum two questions. Additionally, please note that a full transcript and a recording of today's call will be made available on our investor relations webpage shortly after the session ends. Again, thank you for being here.

And now I'll turn it over to Bernd. Thanks, Mark. Dear analysts and investors, our team has delivered an outstanding performance in Q4. We achieved growth in all regions. Only China was declining. This growth was on back of a healthy global market reflected by the book-to-bill of 1.12. Our comparable revenue grew by 7% ex-antigen on strong COMs of plus 11% in Q4 last year. This was driven by strong growth in imaging, variant, and advanced therapies. We also saw a strong 16% growth in adjusted EPS supported by impressive margins at imaging and advanced therapies. I am especially happy... about the good development of our free cash flow, which more than doubled compared to Q4 last year, supported especially by good progress in our inventory levels. Jochen will expand on this in his part. So we have finished this year strong, as indicated early on. Let me briefly run you through the highlights of the full year 2024 from our perspective. First, I would like you to focus on the right side of the chart. We achieved our guidance. Again. Let me allude to China. We achieved our group outlook despite significant headwinds from China, headwinds on growth and margins that were much more intense and longer lasting than we assumed initially. Despite this fact, we achieved our initial outlook nevertheless. Our business is fully intact. Our unique setup provides unparalleled resilience even when the going gets tougher. Looking at 2024 in its entire tier clearly proves this point. We grew comparable revenue by 5.2% ex-antigen and achieved an adjusted EPS of 2 euros and 23 cents, we are proposing an unchanged dividend of 95 cents per share for fiscal year 24. When we started the year, we introduced the concept of the two cores. On the one side, we have our synergistic core where imaging variant and advanced therapies create a unique portfolio of products and solutions, elevating our relevance for customers. In this unique setup, continued innovation sets us even further apart from any competitor. In 2024, we again introduced significant innovations to the market, essentially across the board with the 1.5 Tesla Magnetum Flow Low Helium MRI, our breakthrough innovation in mammography, the Mammomat B-Brilliant or the Rapid Arc Dynamic Atvarian, just to name a few examples. Our innovative strength and our unique portfolio as well as unique set of capabilities has driven continued market share gains for years already and again in 2024. So the strong book to build for the Group is the logical consequence of this strength, achieved despite a weak contribution from China. I am very proud of the team which delivered this strong performance. I am also proud of the successful transformation in our other core where we are transforming to win in the diagnostics market. With the successful and diligent implementation of our transformation program, we have on the one hand prepared the business for future success and on the other hand driven a step change in profitability. Jochen will give you some more details in his part. And on the next chart, I will briefly show you our outlook for 2025. We are expecting 5% to 6% comparable revenue growth for the fiscal year 2025. For EPS, we are guiding for a range of €2.35 to €2.50 per share. This highlights our expectation for very good underlying profitability improvements, nicely overcompensating year-over-year headwinds from lower financial income and a normalizing tax rate. Jochen will give you more insights on the underlying assumptions for our outlook. And with this, I hand it over to Jochen.