Good morning. Thank you for coming today to AmerisourceBergen's Investor Day. With us in the audience, we have members of the board, members of the management team. We're very excited to host an Investor Day, which we have not done in a number of years. In this presentation, you will hear a lot about the company. You'll see our purpose. You will hear about our purpose, you will hear about our strategy, you will hear about our business. In the presentation, you will hear how we see ourselves today, the opportunities we see for tomorrow, and how we are strategically, operationally, and financially positioned to capitalize on our strengths as a purpose-driven organization. Today, we will show you how we are building on our leadership in global healthcare solutions to create healthier futures around the world.
Please take note of our cautionary note. Today, you'll hear from our Steve Collis, Chairman, President, and CEO, who will talk about our purpose, strategy, and vision. Bob Mauch, EVP and Group President, who will speak about our strategic imperatives and how we are positioned to deliver on that vision. EVP and CFO, Jim Cleary will talk about how we're building on our strong financial position to drive sustainable growth and create significant shareholder value. Finally, Susan Lorenz-Fischer, our SVP of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, will talk about our purpose and our ESG commitments and ESG strategy. Finally, at the end of the day, we will have a Q&A session with Steve Collis, Bob Mauch, and Jim Cleary. Now I will turn the presentation over to a video, and Steve Collis will join us right after that.
For more than a century, AmerisourceBergen has played a vital role in healthcare, driven by a simple but profound insight. Without health, the future is unclear. These extraordinary times shine a new light on the work we do to make healthcare more accessible, efficient, and reliable for people and communities across the world, because we believe in the promise of bright, healthy tomorrows.
The lights are up.
Good morning, everybody. It's been a couple of years since we did one. I think it was 2013, so that's a long time, and we've been working hard to put on a good show for you. What does that mean? It means please listen to the content. I know all of us aren't used to being in long in-person meetings, but we really appreciate it. The team has worked very hard, and we couldn't be more proud to be here in New York. We had a wonderful experience last year ringing the bell on our twenty-year anniversary, and it's good to be back, and that was a spectacular day, and we hope today is also gonna be a spectacular day.
We also, because we haven't had an Investor Day for a couple of years, we're tremendously excited to be able to share with you the progress that we've made at AmerisourceBergen, how we feel we've built the enterprise, how we've deployed capital, and that's, it's a great privilege for us to be able to do that in person. I think post in this new phase we're in post the pandemic, I guess we're sort of post the pandemic. It is. I think we just all appreciate the time that we get to have in person with you. I get to work with this executive management team every day.
In putting the slide together, I realized one of the ways you can become an executive management officer at AmerisourceBergen is to have your last name begin with a C. Four out of the seven are beginning with C. We also, I'm very proud to work with. Let me start with Silvana, who's our Head of Human Resources. Silvana comes to us from Merck and Aramark. She's had an extensive background in human resources, and she really has a vision for our global talent to build it up, and it's really a privilege to work with her every day. In September first last year, the legendary John Chou announced his retirement and was succeeded by a protégé of his, Elizabeth Campbell.
Elizabeth had worked with John for so long, and it's a great example of internal succession planning, and we just are thrilled to have Elizabeth take over as our General Counsel. Actually, the third General Counsel in AmerisourceBergen's history, so wonderful. Gina Clark gets to wear many exciting and diverse hats at AmerisourceBergen. In fact, she's in charge of our diversity inclusion program and also works very closely with Susan Lorenz-Fisher, who you'll be hearing today on our sustainability efforts. Leslie Donato has done an incredible job. She's a new recruit into AmerisourceBergen, started before the pandemic, and came from an oncology background with Bayer and before that, with McKinsey. Leslie is doing a great job.
We're gonna talk a lot today about innovation and Leslie heads up, for example, our venture capital fund, but she also really is helping institutionalize innovation in AmerisourceBergen and help us measure it. I would be remiss if I didn't mention two other important members of the team. I hope you're okay with me calling you part of the team. Firstly, our lead director, Dr. Jane Henney, who was FDA Commissioner in the Clinton administration and has done a wonderful job, was the first director recruited into AmerisourceBergen post the merger, and we have had a wonderful relationship with Jane, and she's added a lot to the company. Also, Henry McGee, who heads up our governance and nominating committee. Henry is currently working at Harvard but has a background in, actually, the entertainment and distribution industry.
He's been a great board member as well. We so much appreciate them spending their time with you and that's really wonderful. The two gentlemen that you're gonna be most interested in hearing from, of course, is Bob Mauch, who's our Group President. Bob joined us through the founding of Accredo, which we acquired 15 years ago, and he's had numerous positions at AmerisourceBergen, but he's gonna give you, I think, a wealth of knowledge and examples during his talk today. The star of our show today, I know you all can't wait for Jim Cleary's presentation, but you have to get through myself first before you get to hear Jim's numbers.
Most importantly, and we mean this literally, we take our talent and our culture very seriously. I hope if my presentation can persuade you about anything on that today. We are supported and really followed and partnered by 42,000 team members across AmerisourceBergen. We added 20,000 team members during the pandemic through our acquisition of Alliance. We're gonna talk about that today. Together, we are all driven by our purpose of being united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. That has really been a very galvanizing and unifying purpose statement that has led to sustainable growth, motivation, and guidance for all of our 42,000 team members. A little bit about AmerisourceBergen.
Yesterday I was talking about us being a Fortune 8 company, apparently I learned recently that we slipped to 10. Still a very esteemed place to be. We're number 10 on the Fortune 500 list. Many times that's what people know us best for, aren't you, the company with the giant revenues. We are. We have about, in our last fiscal year, we had $214 billion in revenue. We have 600 global offices. One of our most progressive and interesting and differentiated businesses is World Courier. World Courier has got so many global offices as they literally help manufacturers find the right type of patients in a global setting. It's been an incredibly difficult but rewarding business to run during the pandemic due to flight restrictions.
Often we are shipping temperature control products, cell and gene therapy products. World Courier has done a terrific job during the pandemic and has actually given us, in a way, the industrial fortitude, the sort of expertise that allowed us to do the Alliance acquisition. We really had very little global experience before we acquired World Courier in 2013, and it's been a wonderful addition to the AmerisourceBergen family. Let's just talk, of course we know, the people in front of us in the room know our company so well. Many of you have been sell-side analysts and followers of us for many years. We also have a lot of people on the phone. I...
The more I see this slide and I really just love it because you do have the wholesaler in the middle. You know, I used to think that middleman role was somewhat degrading, derogatory, you know, what's the middleman? Then you have a business like AmerisourceBergen has, where we are giving access and distributing life-changing products, life-sustaining products. We deal with some of the most coveted customers in healthcare around the world, both on the provider side and the manufacturer side. You look at the opportunity that gives you with your distribution foundation and your access to provide complementary solutions. This enables us to create a high degree of impact because of the breadth and depth of our portfolio of solutions.
At any one time, we are managing about over $30 billion in receivables and inventory, and we have close to $50 billion in payables to manufacturers. That financial fortitude that we have, the strong balance sheet we have, the strong role we have in financing, really leads us to have so many different opportunities. Bobby's gonna take you through some very tangible examples, whether we're talking about our Clinical Trial Navigator, our access to digital consultation for vets, value-based care strategies. We will give you lots of great examples of how AmerisourceBergen is tangibly and productively deploying real solutions for our customers. We also have extensive knowledge of our regulatory and legislative support and environment.
One of the things that's been so interesting about Alliance Healthcare for our management team is to learn about all the new healthcare systems, whether it's in France or Spain or Turkey, how does the healthcare and how does the pharmaceutical industry work in those countries, and how do we best participate in it? I'm very convinced that our expertise and knowledge and the way that AmerisourceBergen has developed a culture of sharing knowledge and of taking best practices and deploying them where those opportunities present themselves will make this a very good acquisition for AmerisourceBergen in the long term. We've proven this, for example, with MWI and our Good Neighbor Pharmacy. You wouldn't think that perhaps not that there's much synergy between community pharmacists and community veterinarians, but we've learned a lot about business coaching, best practices, e-commerce from one another, creating a network.
Those are the sort of examples that we believe we'll be able to share in a global platform. I really like this slide a lot. When we were rehearsing, we told you we're a very close team. Our head of HR challenged me and said, "Steve, you're not talking enough about our people. I want our people to be front and center." I said, "Well, find me a slide that embodies it." This is a terrific slide which talks about what we look for in an associate at AmerisourceBergen. We've been busy, as you know, so we've been doing quite a lot of interviews, bringing some new people in, interviewing people for positions internally.
You know, I so often get asked the question: what makes someone successful at AmerisourceBergen? I just pull this out because we do require you to be a considerate person, a people-forward person, someone who engages in business, someone who believes in the power of our enterprise. If there's a remarkable change in AmerisourceBergen since we last met with you in an investor day format, it's the real thinking about an enterprise. It's the thinking about AmerisourceBergen as a collective enterprise with businesses in areas like specialty, like veterinary, like community pharmacy, but how do we bring it all together? I go back to Dave Yost telling me when we had some struggles with the channel conflict between the specialty group and the company in the early days of my career and telling me there's only one cash register.
Well, today we think about there's only one enterprise, and that's been, you know, a wonderful change in the way that our 42,000 team members think. We believe that that's where we'll get to in Europe as well, with a very strong people culture that Alliance Healthcare has. We like people to be resourceful. You know, at the end of the day, we talk a lot about the $214 billion in revenue last year, but we are very mindful of the 1.5% operating margin that we earn and being very conscientious and productive with that. That's what our customers require of us. Our customers are under pressure.
Even if you're a manufacturer, you're feeling a lot more cost pressure as we move to value-based care systems, as governments and single payer systems, for example, are looking for savings wherever they can. We need to have that resourceful environment. The ability also to think about the future and how can you impact the future, and how can you make that future exciting, positive, and productive? How do we create value together? We want people to be a purpose activist, to promote a progressive workplace, to think about our environment and our sustainability, and you're gonna hear from probably the best mind in the industry on that in Susan today. You've got a terrific opportunity to hear what are the latest trends for supply chain and pharmaceutical wholesale companies in the environmental area.
How are we gonna take what is undeniably a lot of momentum and carry on building on this foundation to create, you know, the next generation of wealth and creativity at AmerisourceBergen? I really believe that we can reinforce the strengths of our culture and operating model by investing in our talent and by aligning the organization to support growth. This has been the wonderful opportunity that we've had over the last few years. We've really created much more alignment. The best example I can give you is specialty. We have taken specialty, and I'm gonna show you data on how important specialty is to the future of our industry, and, of course, it has been for a long time.
We have taken that specialty expertise that we had, the knowledge of being patients, patient-centric, the knowledge of working with the manufacturer as a customer, truly thinking about partnering with them, and used that as an incredible example for us during the pandemic to be the distributor for the anti-infective products. AmerisourceBergen really worked with the first authorized emergency use authorization product. Then because of the role we played and because we did it so expertly and because we had such extensive data and tracking capabilities and licensing capabilities, really every manufacturer said, "Why wouldn't we come for you? You have the model built." We continued to invest. We continued to communicate with the CDC.
We continued to communicate with the communities, looking at where the most distressed areas were during the pandemic, and really did an incredible job of getting these life-sustaining products out in just in time and as quickly as we could, working under the regulatory guidelines that we received from the CDC. We were very proud of that. In Europe, in the U.K., we did over 100 million vaccine doses. We did a lot of the lateral flow testing. Throughout the company, we've done a great job of working with our community partners and working with health authorities to get these life-sustaining products out into marketplace. This has obviously had an impact on our financial results.
Many of the accounting ways that, you know, that we've taken title to these products have been a little bit unusual, and Jim will of course talk about that. It has led, along with our general performance of our business, the resiliency of the healthcare economy, particularly here in the United States, has led to very strong financial results and momentum. We wanna be thinking about AmerisourceBergen with our capabilities through businesses like World Courier, Alloga, the Alliance distribution, Alphega, Good Neighbor Pharmacy, Oncology Supply, and ION, all these different businesses, as a differentiated global partner to biopharmaceutical manufacturers and to providers. Specialty, we've talked about it a lot. AmerisourceBergen plays most in the light blue, the developed ten. Those are where we have most of our strong presences.
Specialty is gonna be such a pivotal part of healthcare spending, of healthcare and pharmaceutical spending going forward. AmerisourceBergen has been highly involved in the specialty market, for nearly 30 years now. In 1994, we started our alternate site distributors at Bergen Brunswig, and then post the merger, we've made tremendous investments in our specialty capabilities, going from just distribution to GPO capabilities, to adherence, to access, to value-based consulting, to health economics outcome. We've added all of these businesses, our important Lash Group franchise. All of these have really helped enable an understanding of what the manufacturer's requirements are and what the patient's requirements are.
I believe that we are uniquely focused in this area. When I became CEO of the company, we did, I think, a really good job from a cultural and an experience perspective of blending both the specialty group expertise, the progressive nature of the specialty group, the understanding of the manufacturer, the thought leader in the community oncologists that were so many of our customers with the tremendous operating expertise, the recent SAP implementation that we had completed at our drug wholesale business. I think that has really powered the enterprise that you see today. We also had Bob Mauch, who you'll hear from, come in and really help lead the business in changing the price model for specialty products in the core wholesale business.
Too often, the specialty products were not priced appropriately given the way manufacturers were thinking about rewarding wholesalers and paying wholesalers for the type of work that we were doing. It's very different sometimes when you're shipping, you know, a $5,000-a-box cancer product to an oral solid product. It's just a very different financial model, and we needed to take that into account in our contracting, and we did lead the way in that, and we're proud of the capability that AmerisourceBergen has in specialty, and we intend to use this capability more in our global context. There are some trends that are helping AmerisourceBergen really propel our success. First of all, managing the total cost of care.
More and more people are payers, and systems are looking for solutions to help them manage the total cost of care. We still aren't post the pandemic, but I think it's gonna take some time, and then budgets are gonna be really squeezed, so people need to be thinking about the cost of the products. A positive trend that is helping AmerisourceBergen manage the cost of care is the biosimilar wave and some very big biological products that will lose patent protection. This will make way for a new era of specialty products, including cell and gene therapy products, and we believe, and you'll hear in Bob's presentation, we positioned ourselves very well for this change in products. We also have opportunities with digital transformation.
Often you wouldn't think about a company like AmerisourceBergen as a digital leader, but we have used technology, we have used analytics, we have used different customer engagement models for many, many years. We've been able to take data out of medical records for many years, and these have really helped propel us. One of the opportunities, again, we were most focused on when I first became CEO, was really understanding our pricing models better and using data in a different way to help us with customer profitability modeling. I believe that has really led to what you see today in terms of our financial success and our sustainability of our contracts, the ability we've had to keep the market-leading customers.
There are also strong dynamics in terms of outsourcing by manufacturers. We'll keep on doing more with manufacturers. I believe they wanna work with best-in-class providers. They often wanna work for regulatory reasons with companies like AmerisourceBergen. Why not work with a company that has a global or top ten market expertise? That's our role. We also have, during the pandemic, really become much more experts and much more capable in contracting with governments in the governments in the U.S. The work we did with managing the strategic national stockpile, we could not be more proud of those sort of works, and we believe this will be an opportunity. AmerisourceBergen has traditionally been underserved in those markets, and we'll continue to work on those.
You know, how will we keep our growth going and how will we be differentiated? That's a question that we often get asked when I do the interviews or when I'm in town halls, how will we keep on differentiating ourselves? First of all, we have our purpose, which I've talked a lot about. Our areas of focus, specialty medicine and services, community providers. I told you Gina wears a lot of hats here in our company. She doesn't like this when I talk about the four holy grails, but I'm gonna do it anyway 'cause I'm on the stage. The four holy grails for AmerisourceBergen are community oncologists, community veterinarians, community pharmacists, and community hospitals.
We wanna make sure that those are all around to help serve the patients in the communities that they are centered in. This also helps with disparities. When we started working with Good Neighbor Pharmacies to get vaccine distribution, we believe we were helping those pharmacies tap into patients that would otherwise not have had access to the vaccines. That was a role that we were incredibly proud of, and we took a role both on the legislative front as well as on the patient and product access front to help with that. Customer partnerships. Recently I attended the NACDS, which was great. It was really wonderful to see people after so many years.
Just sitting with various manufacturers, the compliments that I genuinely received on AmerisourceBergen's forward-thinking and accessibility from the management team, the genuine interest that we have in our shared success, I think does differentiate us. Then, of course, we have the global access and opportunity. Five strategic imperatives. You're gonna hear me talk about this. You're gonna hear Bob talk a lot about it. I told you about Leslie Donato, the work she's doing to really institutionalize our strategy and innovation into our core thinking. Of course, it ties into capital deployment, which Jimmy's gonna share with you. We are gonna advance our core business by leading with market leaders, by leveraging the tremendous infrastructure that we have, the efficiency that we have to bring advantages to our customers. You're gonna hear some really good examples about that.
A recent little acquisition we made helps hospitals, large, complex hospitals manage their freight costs. You know, at first when I looked at this, does this make sense for us? It really does, because AmerisourceBergen has such tremendous knowledge of creating logistics and creating efficiency. Why not share that in a consultative manner and in a profit-sharing manner with our customers? We're gonna keep on expanding in our leadership in specialty. It's absolutely imperative to us that we participate in specialty in Europe, that we continue with cell and gene therapies, that we take a leading role in biosimilars. We're gonna help our customers as they shift to the value-based care marketplace, and as they look at being accountable for the proven success of products.
These are areas that we are very focused on, and we believe we have the intellectual confidence, the experience, and the cultural mindset to be able to be successful in that. Alliance Healthcare acquisition, why did we do it? I'll be very candid, there's a couple of reasons we did it. First of all, we got to know the business over a long period of time. We got to see that this was a proven management team with proven leadership in their chosen markets. We also got to have a close relationship with WBA. We shared the WBA bag contracting strategy. We also saw that they had a good mixture of services and distribution business, with about 40% of their operating income coming from services business. That was very important to AmerisourceBergen.
We were very intrigued by the Alphega network of community pharmacists and the role that we could play there. We felt like from an organizational development perspective, AmerisourceBergen was ready to make a big step like this. We moved forward with the largest acquisition we've made in our history. If you take all the other acquisitions we've made during the 11 years I've been CEO, they equal about $6.5 billion, which is what we paid for Alliance Healthcare. It was a big step for us. Thanks to some terrific work by Jim and Laz Kirkorian, our controller, and others, we were very well positioned from a financial perspective. We're able to pay half of the acquisition in cash, and we were able to get close to 20% high teens accretion in the first year on this acquisition.
You know, there's financial outcomes, and then there's intellectual outcomes and experience outcomes. I would say that for everybody, and I hope even for the board, this has been a tremendously interesting and educational and informative and positive experience. We'll continue to invest in innovation to further drive differentiation in the European marketplace, where we believe we have opportunities to create a platform that can feed our services businesses, whether it's 3PL, whether it's value-based contracting, whether it's GPOs. We believe we'll have that opportunity. AmerisourceBergen's vision is to be a global healthcare leader in the marketplaces where we participate, creating unparalleled access, efficiency, and reliability across the global pharmaceutical chain. We'll do this with our foundation of leadership, our differentiated higher-margin services businesses.
We focused on the higher margin and the higher growth markets like specialty, like cell and gene therapy. We look to position ourselves to investors as a sustainable long-term growth company which will enhance commercial solutions and advance innovation in the markets which we serve. Our long-term vision is to maintain leading market share of pharmaceutical distribution. We are now gonna introduce the team that is gonna help share our long-term vision with you on how we're gonna grow higher margin and higher growth businesses within the U.S. and internationally. Then what does our growth algorithm look like? With that, I have much pleasure to hand the stage over to Bob Mauch, our Group President. Bob, thanks for joining us up here today.
Thank you, Steve. Hello. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Steve. Terrific overview and a great way to get us started. Where Steve just ended was that we have a strategy that will do two things that are really important. One, continue our leadership in distribution on a global basis and continue to grow our high-growth, high-margin businesses. It's not away from distribution, it's lead in distribution and grow high-growth, high-margin businesses on a global basis. We have five strategic pillars that will hopefully demonstrate to you how well we're gonna do that. I'm really excited to have the privilege to be here today and share that with you. I also wanna give a nod to Leslie for her terrific work, and the team's work in helping us pull this together on a yearly basis.
It starts with our terrific portfolio of customers and segments within which we play. This is not new to any of you, right? We've been talking for a long time about our leading portfolio of customers, our anchor customers in each of our key segments. It's core to everything that we do, and I'll pull this through throughout the rest of the presentation, because what we do in terms of innovation and solutions is many times targeted to making sure that we have long-term strategic relationships with our largest and our best customers. We're not really interested in transactional relationships. We're not interested in just pick, pack, ship relationships.
We're interested in relationships where we can do all of that, as a foundation, and then work with that leading healthcare company on their strategy, bringing the tremendous resources of AmerisourceBergen to bear to help them succeed. One of the great things about being in our business, and to Steve's point, about being in the middle, is the alignment that we have with our customers. As we look at a customer, we work with a customer, and then we do strategic work together that helps them grow, it makes perfect sense for us. Because when that customer grows, therefore AmerisourceBergen grows. It's great alignment.
As you know, as Steve mentioned, you know, we have leading customers across a broad set of segments, you know, from animal health to health systems, you know, government agencies, community and specialty pharmacy, importantly, community physicians, as well as the biopharma manufacturers, which you'll hear more about today. Often we talk about the customers, and we talk about wraparound services and wraparound solutions, and that helps us grow with our customers, but we don't always have time to get into what does that mean, right? When we have an investor day, we can actually spend a few minutes talking about the things that we do with our customers that really help them grow, help us create that strategic alignment, and therefore the long-term strategic relationships that we desire, and helps us drive growth.
If you just take biopharma manufacturers, for a second, you'll hear a lot about clinical trial support today. At the bottom, of that list, whether that's World Courier, whether that's, health economic design, within clinical trials, we're working on a global basis with manufacturers, to help them with their clinical trials. Community and specialty pharmacy, I'll pick one, and again, I'll start at the bottom, which is, you know, our PSAO and the reimbursement work, that we do with independent community pharmacies. Again, you know about Good Neighbor Pharmacy, you know about Elevate, you know about the long history, that we have in supporting community pharmacies. The value proposition for AmerisourceBergen and those community pharmacies has changed, over time.
We're still very focused on marketing and branding and digital marketing and attracting patients to those stores, but probably the most important thing that we do now is help them negotiate their reimbursement contracts with payers. Because they are a destination in the community, patients wanna go to those pharmacies, and it's our job to make sure that they have reimbursement contracts with the payers that allows them to continue to provide that service in the community. I'll talk a little bit more about how we're pulling that across our segments as well. Within specialty physician services, this is also very core to everything that we do. You think about our oncology business as critical to our past, critical to our future. There, we're really working on inventory management solutions.
I'm gonna talk about a Clinical Trial Navigator as an example that's very targeted to this customer segment. The GPO work that we do there in helping, in partnership with the manufacturers and the providers continues to grow, it continues to add value. It helps those providers who are, like the community pharmacies, like the community veterinarians, critical to access to healthcare. All patients can't get to an academic medical center. In many cases, they need to be in a community setting, and we're proud to support those physicians. Moving on to the health systems and the academic medical centers, those are also very important customer segment for us. This is an area where, disproportionately, lately, we've been able to innovate. You know, we've really cha
Steve talked about how we changed our approach to those customers, you know, by bringing our full line distribution, our specialty distribution, and our services together, helped us have a seamless message. It certainly helped us with our pricing algorithms. Most importantly, it's helping us have a different conversation with those health systems, which is, you know, aligning with their outcomes. What are their growth goals? What are their strategic goals within their communities? Then how can we align with that? Certainly, the distribution services and having the right price is part of that, but it's table stakes, frankly. It's the other work that we're doing that creates a relationship that health system, as they expand their footprint, look to AmerisourceBergen more and more.
Certainly, last but not least, our market-leading presence in animal health, both the companion animal and the production animal side, is one of our high margin, high growth businesses that we intend to continue to highlight and make investments. I'll give you an example of that as we go through. That's number one, you know, that's AmerisourceBergen, right? Long-term strategic relationships with leading healthcare companies on a global basis. That's the first thing you should think about us. Secondly, I talked a good bit about how we're making investments in and with those leading customers, and that leads to our second strategic pillar, which is leverage infrastructure to increase efficiency and support our customers in meeting consumer needs. We got two in one here.
We're gonna touch on both. The first is, and it's the very first thing I said when I got here, is we are going to continue to lead in distribution services on a global basis. What that means is we have to continue to invest in our core business. We have to be more efficient all the time. We have to have higher quality all the time. When you think about, you know, leveraging our infrastructure to increase efficiency, that's that part of it, and we continue to make those investments in our business on an ongoing basis. Secondly, we know that our customers have to interact with their consumers, patients, pet parents, whatever it is that they are in a different way, in a digital way.
As we're enhancing our own capabilities to provide distribution services, we're also building capabilities to help our customers interact with their consumers and patients in a new and more modern way. I'll give you one example of both, and we'll start with an example, which is a video. Again, this is back to the core distribution services. We're not gonna have an opportunity to take a distribution tour, so we're gonna have to do this video virtually. Just as a reminder before I move to the side, this is a U.S. full line distribution center. You'll see stats that are U.S.-centric, and this is one of our large centers within United States.
As you would imagine on a global basis, all different shapes and sizes of distribution and logistics centers, but this is one of our premier sites here in the U.S.
At AmerisourceBergen, we exist to create healthier futures. Healthcare providers have trusted us to provide the medications they need to care for their patients for more than 100 years. We ensure the efficient, reliable, and secure delivery of medicines to providers across the United States. On-time delivery of the products you need to care for your patients starts with a tote. Orders are assigned to a single or multiple totes depending on order size. At our automated tote inductions, totes are scanned and enter the queue, where they can then be directed to locations throughout our warehouse for the right products to fulfill the order. Our reusable totes reduce waste across the supply chain as customers return their totes through their delivery drivers. Our APS or A-frame stores inventory and releases it automatically.
Products with the highest demand are typically the ones stored to the APS, making order fulfillment faster and more accurate. Our dedicated team is constantly working to keep the APS stocked and output at a steady pace. Wearable computer technology helps maintain momentum during channel refills. Once the tote is processed, it travels to the order belt where products are dispensed and then transferred to the next step in order fulfillment. If an error is detected, a ticket is printed, and it will be manually corrected by an associate. Each of our distribution centers average 100 patient-minded team members committed to helping improve lives every day. Strategic slotting makes it easy for associates to make selections accurately and quickly. Products that require special handling are protected to ensure they arrive uncompromised.
Chemotherapy products are bagged in special hazmat bags and placed in their own totes to protect our associates and our customers. Before an order is closed, product barcodes are scanned through our wearable computer technology and totes are re-scanned. If the barcodes are not correct, the system will not allow order closure, providing accurate quality control. The order verification stations provide an extra check to ensure order accuracy. A selection of totes are chosen at random for real-time auditing to make sure customers receive the correct product in the correct condition and quantity. To streamline processes, orders for products in large quantities and certain medical equipment go through the full case picking and a non-conveyable phase. Proper storage for temperature-sensitive medications is critical to maintaining product integrity.
All refrigerated or frozen products are maintained within the appropriate temperature range in our distribution centers and across the product's entire journey to a customer. Orders are packed in our cold chain packouts, which are also a sustainable solution that uses water-based, plant-based, and non-toxic materials. We maintain the security of Schedule II through Schedule V controlled substances within our distribution centers and en route to our customers. This is a responsibility we take very seriously. We limit personnel access to these products and provide training to ensure proper storage, handling, and transportation. As a tote nears shipment, labels are inserted to provide the shipping codes, destination address, and customer number, as well as route stop information in preparation for delivery. The tote is secured with a lid and double straps. At AmerisourceBergen, our culture of safety combines premium technology and well-defined processes to minimize errors.
We ensure associates have the proper equipment to avoid injury while fulfilling orders. We maintain a clear environment through technology like UV robots that actively disinfect our distribution centers throughout the day. The final stop in our warehouse is the shipping dock, where totes are secured on their proper shipping pallet and loaded for delivery. Stretch wrapping is the final measure used to ensure minimal movement during transport. At AmerisourceBergen, we ensure that crucial medications and healthcare products efficiently, reliably, and securely reach their destinations every day. We are the critical link between pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare providers, helping patients access the medications they need precisely when they need them.
Okay. Hopefully that was helpful. A quick reminder, just especially as we were watching the robot going through the distribution center, disinfecting, and we're not doing a lot of looking back here in terms of our performance in COVID-19, but I do think it's worth a note to the amazing, you know, frontline team members at AmerisourceBergen, because while all of that was going on and while many people had the opportunity to work remotely or work from home, those folks were showing up to work every single day, and we never missed a beat. Through the worst of times, and in the beginning, that was a huge demand surge. Later on, it was managing through COVID infections.
We never missed a beat, and a patient never missed a medication. Again, this is. We're gonna talk about the innovation that we're doing in the future, but this is core. We're gonna continue to invest in it, and we're gonna continue to lead in this area. Additionally, I talked about the things that we'll do with our customers to help them with their consumers. We used to say B2B2C, which gets kind of confusing, but I kind of like it. The B2B part is what we just talked about, and this is a little bit more of the B2C, and our customer is the B2C component of B2B2C.
We used the veterinary example today, and I'm gonna describe an ecosystem that we're building for our veterinarian customers that help them attract and retain pet parents and pets and also create better clinical outcomes for those pets. While we're using a veterinary example, and again, we wanna really emphasize the strength of that business, and it is one of our high growth, high margin businesses, we're doing very similar things with our physician customers. We're doing very similar things with our community pharmacy customers.
If you think about that, you know, ecosystem of services digitally enabled to make sure that they can interact with their patients, serve their patients, attract patients, and create better clinical outcomes, that's something that we're doing across many areas, but we'll focus on the veterinary channel today. Here you see an ecosystem that goes all the way from a pet portal to automated reminders, and I'll call out a couple of key areas. First is a portal. It's powered by our Alley DVM solution, which is owned by AmerisourceBergen. This is a practice management enablement solution, which has a portal which can be accessed by the pet parent, by the clinician, where you can see a 360 view of what's going on with your pet.
What's your next appointment? What are the clinical results, lab results? Just as we might do as we log into whatever hospital we log into to see, you know, where we are, when our next appointment is, communicate with the clinician. That's what we can do in the pet portal, which is powered by Alley DVM. If you move to the right of the page, home delivery is also a big part. You know, one of the dynamics in the veterinary space is that other players, whether they be e-commerce or traditional retailers, are also interested in moving in to the veterinary space. We're focused on helping them keep those prescriptions within the practice.
In order to do that, back to the e-commerce digital part of this, you're gonna have to have a home delivery solution to do that. I'll move down to the bottom, where it says preventative care plans and wellness plans are the number one reported need by both pet parents and by veterinarians. It's not insurance. What a wellness plan does is it allows you to, you know, pay as you go, basically. You don't have, you know, the big surprise bill if your pet becomes ill. I'll highlight a few of these. Another call-out here is some of these are owned solutions, some of these are done on partnership, and you'll see that again through the presentation.
As we think about innovating, and growth, we don't have to own everything, right? We're gonna develop some things internally through our innovation engine. We're gonna do some things in partnership, and obviously we'll continue to do acquisitions, where that's appropriate. What you see here is something that we're doing for the community veterinarians, that honestly you would expect and I think you would appreciate, in your own life. We're doing that. Again, we're doing this within physician practices and community pharmacies as well. In addition to the veterinarians, I'll give you a couple of examples of how we're doing this with hospitals when I talked about the level of innovation, that is going there.
First, and critically important is our drug shortage mitigation solution, which is called, I just forgot the name of it. What's it called, Ben? SureSupply. Thank you. Wow. SureSupply. Sorry. It's called SureSupply. This is a really interesting program because, you know, we're always with our customers, and we're listening to what they need. If you go into a health system, you're gonna hear what they need is shortage solutions, particularly with generic injectables. Our team, in conjunction with the innovation team, you know, worked hard to develop a solution that allows health systems, if they choose to, on a proactive basis, work with us carrying more inventory on their behalf in conjunction with the manufacturer. This is health systems wants to do it, we help them connect with the manufacturer.
The manufacturer produces more, right? This is before there's a shortage. You have to have some predictive analytics on what you think might be in short supply, and then we're increasing supply. Importantly, this doesn't change our fair share allocation. None of that changes. This is actually more supply in the network and through our virtual distribution and virtual inventory management capabilities, we can continue to move that product throughout the network, so it doesn't sit in a warehouse and become spoilage. This is a very successful program for us. Our customers are signing up at a pretty rapid pace.
The trick here is you've gotta be able to predict what's gonna be on short supply, which is not easy, but health systems and manufacturers are willing to, you know, enter into that arrangement, and then we facilitate that for them. A critically important strategic initiative that we're helping health systems with. The payer and product access solutions, I wanna hit this because it calls in a couple of really important themes for us, strategically. I mentioned earlier, and Steve mentioned, as well, how we're trying to look at parts of our business and find solutions that work well in oncology, for example, that might also work well in other areas. Hopefully you'll hear me say throughout this, we're using it in this vertical, but also others.
This is a great example under the product and payer access solutions, and I'll just give you two quick points. Our ION GPO in oncology, which you all know really well. We're working on that. We actually did a full digital transformation of that, which is working really well. Manufacturers and the physician practices like it. While we're doing that, we also realized that we could pull that across to health systems. The same GPO contracting that we're doing with the physician practices, health systems and manufacturers were interested in, so we now have a health system specialty GPO. A quick example of core capability that we're using in another area to drive growth. Secondly, is the PSAO services.
I mentioned that with the community pharmacies, but the health systems, as they expand their footprint, many times outside of the four walls of the hospital, they are having specialty pharmacies or other clinics where they also need access to the payer contract. We developed a specialty PSAO using the expertise that we had in retail and then applying that to the health system. There are others. I could spend more time on this slide, but I won't. I want you to get a feel here for how we're working with our customers to enable a strategy, enable their growth, and we're working horizontally and from a product standpoint, pulling these services across to other areas and then driving growth within AmerisourceBergen. That's two. Now we're on three.
Steve spent a good bit of time here. What I'll be doing is just reinforcing really what Steve said, right? This is critical for AmerisourceBergen. I like that it's right in the middle, and I kinda think of it as a pyramid. If you put it in a pyramid, it'd be sitting at the top. This is just as core to everything that we do. You know, we're very proud of the nearly 30-year leadership that we've had in the specialty distribution and specialty services space. You know, a huge nod to Steve and his vision for really creating this part of our industry back in the early nineties and all the acquisitions and builds that went after that.
We're proud, we're happy, and we're not complacent, right? We know that in order to continue in that leadership position, we're gonna have to evolve with the market. We're gonna have to invest in new services and continue the strength of what we currently have. I'm gonna talk about, you know, how we think about the strength of our specialty services on a global basis. You know, Steve also hit this pretty hard in the beginning, but when you think about leadership and specialty, think about that on a global basis, and the Alliance Healthcare footprint really will help us here. First, we have the broadest portfolio of leading specialty solutions. Globally scaled logistics and 3PL services. We have wholesaling and pre-wholesaling operations in 15 countries.
We can do clinical trial logistics in 50-plus countries. We're a leader in temperature control and order monitoring. As you think about the specialty landscape evolving to even more specialized products, and cell and gene is the easy example here, this is core to how we'll continue to lead. Second is the clinical and commercialization services that we also can implement on a global basis. The market access and regulatory consulting that we do. Remember, every single product, new and innovative product that comes to market is gonna need to demonstrate their value proposition, their cost effectiveness. That could be at a payer in the United States, or it could be at the government level in Europe, right? You're gonna have to do that no matter what you do. We have a core competency and a leadership role there.
We talked a lot already about the clinical trial support, and our data and analytics capabilities are significant and growing. The specialty distribution leadership, also on a global basis, you know, we lead in oncology and ophthalmology. I talked about the GPO solutions, and we're continuing to build and grow there. The broadest portfolio of specialty solutions we have, we have today. We also have significant services across the clinical and commercialization journey. I hit on a few, and this is just, you know, to reinforce the point, but meaningful services in the approval phase. Again, that could be health economics, it could be, clinical trial logistics, coverage and access.
Think about the work that we do in terms of reimbursement support, you know, patient access and adherence. We're working with providers and manufacturers there. Accessibility kind of back to the bottom left. You know, helping manufacturers bring those innovative products to market is a core of everything that we do. When you layer our significant specialty capabilities along with the breadth of our commercialization and innovation solutions, it gives us a tremendous platform to continue to innovate. Cell and gene is the best example of us thinking about. We're very proud of our excellent performance over the last three decades, and we know in order to lead in cell and gene therapy, we're gonna need to continue to invest and innovate. However, we have a terrific start.
We talked about the World Courier capabilities in terms of the specialized logistics on a global basis. That could be clinical trials or that could be commercial services for cell and gene therapy. I'm gonna show an example of a partnership that we have with a company called TrakCel that helps with orchestration of cell and gene therapy, and another example of where, you know, we don't necessarily have to own. We're happy to partner. Our unique position at the intersection, kind of back to the middle of the biopharma innovators and the providers, gives us a unique view to all of this and also a unique competitive position in addition to our global reach, which will help us drive leadership here as well.
Again, you take the capabilities that we have, the capabilities that we'll build and the global platform, that's a reason that we believe that AmerisourceBergen will continue to lead in specialty and, in particular in cell and gene. I'm gonna do a quick review. How are we doing on time, Ben? I'm gonna do a quick review. These build a bit to contribute to Rx outcomes. Think about our incredible strategic customer relationships on a global basis, and the fact that those relationships are strategic relationships in almost every case. Think about the way that we're making those strategic in our second pillar is we're becoming more and more efficient all the time, and we're investing with those customers to enable their growth. That makes us even more aligned to them strategically over the long run.
Continuing our leadership and specialty, which you can count on, leads us to why, on a global basis, we believe that we can continue to contribute to Rx outcomes by expanding our biopharma services beyond what we have today. I'll spend a minute on, you know, why we think that's an attractive market and why we think AmerisourceBergen has the right to win. Number one in the market trend there. The addressable market for outsourced biopharma services is $100 billion and expected to grow at a 5%-10% CAGR. If you move to the right, and really everything that we've talked about for the last hour or so is the significant and meaningful position that AmerisourceBergen has with the downstream clinical customers and the upstream biopharma manufacturers.
Secondly, when you think about trends in biopharma as the small and mid-size manufacturers, much of the innovation is coming from small and mid-size biopharma. That's on a global basis from a geographic footprint standpoint. Our ability to interact with those small and mid-size biopharma customers on a global basis, and the fact that many of those customers would like to buy multiple services at the same time. I don't wanna call it one stop shop 'cause I don't think that's necessarily it, but they are more willing than the largest of the manufacturers to buy a portfolio of services from one service provider that will help them bring products to market, we believe in multiple markets.
Again, the global footprint will really matter. Having said that, large pharma is also increasing their outsourcing. The difference is they're more likely to buy a point solution than they are to buy a portfolio of solutions, but that's okay because our point solutions are intended to be best in class, and in many cases, they are. Certainly as we buy and build, they will be. Those amazing customer relationships, the leadership and specialty, the investments that we're making, and all of those customer relationships leads us to a strong belief that expanding our biopharma services business on a global basis is the right thing to do for AmerisourceBergen, and that will help us grow our high margin, high business services in addition to strengthening our core. Number five.
All of this was about innovation, you know, all throughout. It's about innovation, that's a theme throughout. I think Leslie made a great call here. This could have been a kind of a horizontal enabler of all this, but it's so important to us, from an execution standpoint, and that we get the organization focused on innovation from a cultural standpoint, that we wanted to make sure that it was a standalone pillar. I'll talk a bit more about this and give some examples. Our areas of focus for innovation are, as you can see on the left, everything from clinical trial services to home health services.
One of the things I didn't talk about in health systems was home health infusion services that we're helping them build. As you go to the right, that leads to strategic partnerships and innovation that we're doing again on a global basis. In order to do that, and this is another nod to talent and digital, and they have to go together. In order to do that, we've been pushing the organization and really leading through not only a digital transformation but a transformation of the types of talent that we need to bring into AmerisourceBergen. We've talked a little bit about the horizontal and the product mindset. That's a different skill set than a vertical P&L leader. We need both.
We have lots of terrific vertical P&L leaders. We're adding product and horizontal leaders that will help us drive the digital transformation that we need. We have amazing technology solutions. It's the cultural part of the digital transformation that we're continuing to work on, and we'll need more talent oriented that way in order to do it. Steve talked about the leadership competencies that we need, the product mentality. I talked about the horizontal mindset. Then from a digital standpoint, that enterprise fabric. So instead of having solutions for customer management in each of our businesses, the enterprise approach is to have one solution for customer management, which we're moving to.
Obviously, investments in the cloud are really important to us, and we've mentioned our data and analytics capabilities pretty significantly already. A couple of examples, three examples, and then you'll get to the part that I know you're waiting for because Jim is up. We have a break next, actually, and then Jim will be up. I did wanna talk about the Clinical Trial Navigator, which is an innovation that we just announced within the last two weeks. Before I get there, one disclaimer, these are three examples of many. These are very early stage. They're illustrative. These are not necessarily things that we're trying to put a marker out there right now for, you know, for future tracking or updates.
We just want you to see, the types of interesting work, that we're doing. In fact, our innovation, portfolio has nearly 50 different projects in it, at different stages, with meaningful, profit contribution, in the future. We're just gonna give you three examples here, today. Clinical Trial Navigator. We talked about the investments that we're making, with biopharma manufacturers as well, as our customers. The Clinical Trial Navigator is a great example of something when you think about the problem to be solved, which is clinical trial enrollment is much more difficult than it should be, right? Accruals are too slow. We don't get enough patients. We don't get enough diversity. It's a real challenge in clinical research.
What we have here is a biopharma customer set who's very interested in improving that, right? They have many incentives in terms of speeding products to market, speeding through their clinical trials. We have a customer set in our community oncology base who also would like to be more involved in clinical research. Most of this is done in academic medical centers. The really important part of moving clinical trials out into the community is that is where you will increase diversity of patients in those sites because they may not have access to the academic medical center, and they will be in the community. What the Clinical Trial Navigator does is it sits on top of the solution that a physician would have in their practice.
It plugs into what you see in the middle, which is an advanced IQ, which is our network of physicians who have agreed to be a part of clinical trials. There's a site assist, which helps from an analytics and really a machine learning and advanced analytics way helps identify the right sites for certain clinical trials. The patient identifier then drills down another level to find the patients within that practice who would be candidates for those clinical trials. Again, an automated way. It's not intrusive from a technology standpoint. It sits on top.
It connects to, you know, the government clearinghouses of clinical trials, and then works in a way that it really feeds to the manufacturer, the site opportunities, and then to the clinician, the patient opportunity. We're excited about this. The biopharma manufacturers are excited about it as well as our oncology physicians. We talked about cell and gene therapy and our partnership with TrakCel. This example is that. Our World Courier specialty logistics, our partnership with TrakCel, in addition to our Lash Group FUSION platform, which is also very advanced technology, and linking the three of them together so that we have the specialty logistics, the very important orchestration. You know, and as you know, kind of right now, cell and gene is kinda, you know, one-to-one.
Cells from you to the lab back to you. In time we'll get some more of an allogenic state where we'll have more patients involved, but right now it's one-to-one. The reimbursement and adherence part that FUSION through the Lash Group can add is really a missing piece out there right now, and this goes together. We have another video to show you now.
With the integration of OCELLOS and FUSION, we are entering a new phase in therapy ecosystem connectivity. OCELLOS by TrakCel streamlines the orchestration of therapies from subject enrollment to treatment and administration, ensuring chain of custody and chain of identity are managed at each step of the patient journey. FUSION, Lash Group CRM and patient support ecosystem leverages emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence for benefit verification, prior authorization, and multi-channel communication between payers, providers, and patients. The integration of the two platforms accelerates speed to therapy by creating hub and care team connectivity. Stakeholders have complete visibility of the patient's journey with a Salesforce-powered solution designed in an easy-to-read report and action format. The bi-directional flow of data starts when a provider creates a patient account and captures enrollment information.
Data flows from the provider to the patient hub, where the use of cutting-edge technology begins to seamlessly determine patients' eligibility through benefits and prior authorization submission. A Lash Group coordinator initiates benefit investigation and prior authorization when needed. The patient's care teams are provided a near real-time response of the patient's coverage determination and can prepare for the next set of tasks to move the prescribed treatment process forward. The result is seamless and timely exchange of information. Delivering life-saving therapies starts with expedient patient support to limit delays to treatment and access. AmerisourceBergen will continue to push advanced therapies forward by connecting patients and care teams with the right blend of high-tech and high-touch services throughout the manufacturing process and product administration. Let's take a look at the integrated platforms and schedule a demo today.
Okay, one more example, and then we are to break. Yep, go back one. Go back two. Okay. The last example is the AmerisourceBergen Marketplace or AB Marketplace. Let's go back to community pharmacy as an example, although I'll tell you right up front, this will be very applicable to veterinarians, physicians, and we think other sites of care. Really taking out some of the complexity in their day-to-day. If you think about a community pharmacy, if you walk in, they're selling many products in their front of store that AmerisourceBergen can't stock in our warehouses. It's just not part of our business model. We don't, you know, really have the space to carry that many SKUs and that many different sizes.
They often have to find their front-end items, and I don't mean their OTC items 'cause they would get those from us, but their front-end items. It could be a pencil, it could be a phone charger, it could be a Bluetooth speaker. You know, any number of things, other kinda consumable, CPG-type products they're not getting from us. With our infrastructure, leveraging our scale, leveraging our ecosystem, we have the ability to allow those customers to, you know, log into our e-commerce platform, which is called ABC Order, and then access those products. The financial transaction is done there, and then that product is delivered from the manufacturer or the supplier. It's what you'd expect, right? This is, you know, coming to be more popular in the marketplace.
We have a very unique opportunity because our customers would prefer to go onto one website and buy everything. Right now, they're going to multiple stops, including, you know, maybe even a trip to a club store, big box, and buying things that they wanna sell in their pharmacy. We're excited about this. We've got more than 200 pharmacies enrolled in a pilot. Right now we're getting terrific response. We have our ThoughtSpot trade show coming up in Orlando in July, where we'll have a significant, you know, probably 3,000 or so customers, Good Neighbor Pharmacy customers, where we'll launch this to them at that time on a limited basis, and we'll continue to roll it out.
This is an example of customer focus, reducing complexity, meeting a need for them, and then leveraging our digital capabilities as well as the ecosystem that we have between the manufacturer suppliers and the customers. A theme that we've talked about throughout the day. Summary quickly and then to break. We're gonna continue to lead in our core distribution services, and we believe our five strategic pillars will help us grow in the long term on a sustainable basis through great execution, through innovation, through leveraging our global footprint. I thank you all very much for your attention today.
Thank you. We will now take a 10-minute break, and we'll start back up. For the viewers at home and the people in the room, we'll start back up at 10:25 when Jim Cleary will walk us through the financial portion of today's presentation.
Thank you. I'll turn the presentation over to our EVP and CFO, Jim Cleary.
Thank you very much, Bennett. As Bennett said, I'm Jim Cleary, CFO, and today I will talk about our strong financial performance. I'll talk about our long-term growth outlook, and I'll also cover our growth drivers. I really want to thank Bob and Steve for that excellent overview of our business and our strategic priorities. I also really wanna thank all of our sell-side analysts who are here in person today. Thanks for the important and great work that all of you do. We really appreciate it, as I'm sure our investors do. I also wanna thank our investors and other key stakeholders who are participating virtually today. As a quick reminder, my comments today will focus primarily on adjusted non-GAAP financials. For more details on our GAAP financials, please refer to our SEC filings. Fiscal year 2022.
This year, AmerisourceBergen is demonstrating strong financial, strategic, operational, and purpose-driven results. In fiscal 2022, we've continued delivering exceptional financial results, and it's driven by execution and momentum across our business. As you know, our EPS guidance this year is $10.80-$11.05 a share, which represents growth of 17%-19% over fiscal year 2021. As you know, our adjusted operating income guidance for this year is growth of at least high teens % growth. Our free cash flow guidance or adjusted free cash flow guidance for the year is $2 billion-$2.5 billion. We feel very good about the year that we're having. We're also honored to be playing a key role in distributing COVID-19 treatments in the U.S. and vaccinations and tests internationally.
It really is a testament of the important role we're playing in the healthcare system. It's also an opportunity for us to demonstrate the strength and the efficiency of our operations, and it also shows that we have enhanced relationships with our government stakeholders. We're also making great progress on integrating the Alliance Healthcare acquisition. As you know, today is the one-year anniversary of closing that deal, and I'm sure that we have several members of the Alliance team in Europe who are participating in the meeting virtually, and I really wanna thank the Alliance management team for their incredible dedication in working on the integration. I also wanna thank them for the strong financial results out of the gate.
We've been, you know, very pleased with the Alliance financial results out of the gate, particularly on a constant currency basis. Across AmerisourceBergen, we've also made progress on initiatives to advance our purpose and talent. As you all know, talent is incredibly key to what we do, and we've made investments to attract, support and retain talent. We've also continued our commitment to ESG, diversity, equity and inclusion. ESG is something that is, you know, very important to our senior management team, and it's very important to our board, as is diversity, equity and inclusion. We have Susan Lorenz-Fisher after me, our Senior Vice President of corporate responsibility and sustainability, who will give an update on our ESG initiatives. Our strong performance in fiscal year 2022 has been built on a legacy of sustainable growth.
This slide shows results since fiscal year 2016. You'll see that EPS has grown at a double-digit compound annual growth rate, with EPS growing at a 10% rate, excluding the impact of COVID sales, and all in at a 12% growth rate, including the contribution of COVID sales. This double-digit CAGR that you're familiar with is driven by organic operating income growth and value-creating capital deployment. Solid execution in our key distribution businesses which have benefited, as Steve and Bob talked about, from leading customers, and have also benefited from rebalanced contracts. We've talked about the great job our team has done over the last few years of rebalancing contracts so we're not overly leveraged to a particular drug class.
Growth has also been supported by being well positioned in key higher growth areas, including specialty logistics and animal health. In specialty, our specialty position services business and our health systems business have benefited from positive innovation and demographic trends, and also increasing adoption and utilization of biosimilars, which has been a, you know, very good, profit growth driver for us. In specialty logistics, the World Courier business has seen growth as manufacturers leverage our expertise and our temperature control capabilities to handle high-priority shipments. Our animal health business is the leading animal health distributor in the U.S. and, as you know, is, benefiting from the many positive long-term trends in the animal health market.
We've also benefited from the Alliance acquisition, and the Alliance acquisition, as we've commented, has delivered a high teens EPS accretion in its first year. Our business model also generates sustainable and growing adjusted free cash flow, which is a real value creator. Our strong long-term free cash flow growth has allowed us to invest in our business, improving our infrastructure and our efficiency. It's also enabled attractive opportunities to move our business forward and advance strategic imperatives, particularly higher margin, higher growth businesses. Bob highlighted just a bit ago our innovation engine, which is powered by our cash flow and by our investments in our talent, and also both internal and external strategic investments. These investments have resulted in new solutions that deliver value-added solutions and a differentiated experience for our customers and our partners.
Strong cash flow generation also allowed us to acquire Alliance Healthcare, which expands our global scale and reach and broadens our global platform of manufacturer services. We expect to repay about $2 billion or two-thirds of the debt related to the acquisition by March 2023, ahead of our initial schedule to repay. This is, of course, enabled by our strong free cash flow. As you'll see on this slide, we've had an 11% compound annual growth rate in free cash flow since fiscal year 2017 based on the midpoint of our fiscal year 2022 guidance. We have a value-creating capital deployment strategy and a return on invested capital in the high teens.
Our strong cash flow has allowed us to invest in our business through CapEx and M&A with high returns for our business overall and an average return on invested capital of around 18% since fiscal 2017. We also have been able to return excess cash to our shareholders through share repurchases and our steadily growing dividend. Since 2017, we have repurchased $2.1 billion in shares. Importantly, our board recently approved a new share repurchase authorization that we announced this morning for $1 billion, enabling us to act on opportunities to repurchase our shares. Our overall capital deployment strategy will be balanced between internal investment, strategic M&A, opportunistic share repurchases, and maintaining a reasonable and steadily growing dividend.
Our legacy of long-term performance gives us confidence in our ability to drive strong results driven by a differentiated value creation framework. We're focused on growing operating income, which is supported by key factors. Scale, efficiency, and leading customer relationships give us a solid growth base, which is bolstered by our leadership in higher growth, higher margin businesses. By leveraging our distribution scale and commercial capabilities, we create value for our customers in the broader healthcare system. Long-term customer relationships allow us to become close partners and understand our customers' businesses to jointly develop solutions to meet their unique needs. Our leadership positions in specialty, biopharma manufacturing services, and animal health allow us to capture the opportunities presented by positive trends in these markets.
Our specialty physician services and biopharma manufacture services businesses benefit from positive demographic trends and continued pharmaceutical innovation, which will be long-term tailwinds over our long-range plan. Similarly, animal health has positive long-term trends, including innovation, product innovation in the animal health market, of course, the human-pet bond, which we all know and understand, and also increasing global protein demand. In addition to strong underlying operating income growth, value creation is enhanced by our capital deployment. Our capital deployment strategy centers on three key pillars. Growth investments, returning capital to shareholders, and a healthy balance sheet and free cash flow generation. Of course, our growth investments include CapEx and M&A, such as the Alliance Healthcare acquisition. Returning capital to shareholders includes, of course, share repurchases and our dividend.
A key new announcement is the $1 billion new share repurchase authorization that we announced today. We're also proud of our healthy balance sheet and our free cash flow generation, and it's really these things, the balance sheet and the free cash flow generation that enable the capital deployment. Before I turn to our long-term growth outlook, I would like to remind you, and this is just as discussed on our second quarter earnings call, we expect $0.70 of adjusted EPS contribution in fiscal year 2022 from COVID product sales. We expect $0.60 of contribution in the U.S. Healthcare Solutions segment from COVID treatment distribution, and we expect $0.10 of contribution in the International Healthcare Solutions segment from COVID vaccine and testing distribution.
This would bring our baseline EPS for long-term growth to a range of $10.10-$10.35 a share. Now I'll turn to our long-term growth outlook. At the midpoint of our range, we expect 10% or double-digit compound annual EPS growth, and we have confidence in our ability to deliver that double-digit EPS CAGR in our long range plan. Over the long term, we expect consolidated adjusted operating income to grow organically in the 5%-8% range, driven by U.S. Healthcare Solutions operating income growth of 5%-8% and International Healthcare Solutions operating income growth of 5%-8% on a constant currency basis. In addition, we expect capital deployment to contribute an incremental 3%-4% to growth.
Now, capital deployment contributes 4%, setting aside fiscal year 2023, where it's more like 3% in fiscal year 2023, given our debt paydown commitment in fiscal year 2022 and 2023 as a result of the Alliance Healthcare acquisition. At 3%-4%, and this is important, contribution from capital deployment, our credit metrics and credit capacity increase throughout the LRP, leaving room for additional M&A and additional share repurchases to further enhance growth beyond 4%. Keep in mind that we're currently integrating an acquisition that contributed significantly more to growth. In fact, it contributed high teens EPS accretion in the first year.
At 5%-8% organic operating income growth and at 3%-4% growth from capital deployment, it results in adjusted diluted EPS growth of 8%-12% or a double-digit compound annual growth rate at the midpoint of the range for our LRP. Before turning to long-term growth drivers, I will make some early comments on fiscal year 2023. Excluding operating income from COVID products in both fiscal year 2022 and 2023, we would expect organic consolidated operating income growth to be in the 5% range in fiscal year 2023. As it relates to COVID contribution in fiscal year 2023, that contribution could easily be less than half of the $0.70 we have in our fiscal year 2022 guidance.
Excluding the COVID impact in fiscal year 2023, we expect operating income growth in the 5% range and growth from capital deployment in the 3% range. We will provide fiscal year 2023 guidance in November once we've completed our bottoms-up planning process. At that point in time, we'll probably have a better idea of COVID product impact in fiscal year 2023, and we'll announce all of that in November when we announce our fiscal year 2022 year-end results. I'll close by saying, we are confident in our ability to execute in fiscal year 2023 and long term, and we're confident in our double-digit EPS compound annual growth rate in the long range plan. With that, I'll turn now to what are the growth drivers in U.S. Healthcare Solutions and then in International Healthcare Solutions.
What you'll hear here is highly consistent, of course, from what you heard from Steve and Bob. Our U.S. Healthcare Solutions segment will continue to benefit from our foundation in pharmaceutical distribution, which has shown solid, stable growth and strong cash flow generation. The business is well-positioned with long-term strategic relationships with leading customers across channels that enable us to grow as our customers grow. Our investments in infrastructure, technology, and innovation in our distribution centers position us to continue supporting our customers' growth. Building off the strong base, we see incremental growth opportunities from our leadership in specialty biopharma manufacturer solutions and animal health. In specialty and biopharma manufacturer solutions, we're uniquely positioned to support complex therapies coming to market and specialty physician practices and health systems, as Bob referenced.
Our animal health business is a leading distributor of animal health products in the U.S. and is well-positioned to capitalize on the positive long-term trends. In both pharmaceutical distribution and our higher margin, higher growth businesses, we benefit from the positive demographic trends and increased innovation that further drive growth. In our International Healthcare Solutions, we also have you know very key growth drivers like our U.S. Healthcare Solutions segment. In international, we're centered on the foundation in distribution with complementary higher margin, higher growth solutions. The higher margin, higher growth solutions represent actually a higher percentage of operating income in the international segment versus in the U.S. segment. Our leadership in distribution spans Europe and beyond with a mix of established and emerging markets and key anchor customers.
Our long-term relationships with key customers in the international segment include, of course, Boots UK, which is signed through 2031, and the Alphega network of independent pharmacies. Our industry-leading biopharma manufacturer services include our World Courier business and Alliance Healthcare's range of manufacturer services businesses, including Alloga, Alphega, and Skills. We see meaningful opportunity to use our expanded scale in biopharma manufacturer services to better support manufacturers bringing innovative products to market. One example of this is opportunities for World Courier and Alloga to work together to serve manufacturers. Like in the U.S., we also provide a range of downstream services to pharmacies and providers. For example, we provide training, branding, and retail support for our Alphega pharmacy members, similar to we do with Good Neighbor Pharmacy in the U.S.
Capital deployment also enables us to get the double-digit EPS compound annual growth rate at the midpoint of our range. Capital deployment drivers of our EPS CAGR include, of course, strategic and a disciplined approach to M&A, focused on advancing our strategic priorities and delivering strong financial returns. For example, our acquisition of Alliance Healthcare was both highly accretive, as we mentioned, high teens EPS accretion in the first year, and allowed us to advance our strategic imperatives, as Steve outlined. Opportunistic share repurchases help us build on our strong operating income growth and deliver double-digit average EPS growth. This is of course supported by our new $1 billion board authorization of share repurchases, and we resumed share repurchases in May 2022 after having paused for a while to prioritize paying down the Alliance Healthcare debt.
Our capital deployment strategy, it's enabled by strong free cash flow generation, and as you know, we expect to generate between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow in fiscal year 2022. We've steadily delivered adjusted free cash flow growth in recent years and stand to benefit from Alliance Healthcare's cash flow generation, which is, you know, a good cash flow generating business just like AmerisourceBergen. AmerisourceBergen is well-positioned to continue driving value for our stakeholders. We have the foundation in pharmaceutical distribution with leading customer relationships in key areas and complementary higher margin, higher growth businesses. We have leadership in specialty and biopharma manufacture services, where we benefit from demographics and innovation and are well-positioned to support continued pharmaceutical innovation. We also benefit from our global platform of biopharma manufacture services.
We focus on both margins and operating income dollars, which are enhanced by our higher growth, higher margin businesses, our diligent contracting, and our rebalancing of contracts, and our disciplined expense management, leveraging our scale and efficiency. Capital deployment is a key component of our growth algorithm. We're very mindful of return on invested capital, and we aim to deliver strong returns. As I said, our ROIC has averaged 18% since fiscal year 2017, and we have a very strong balance sheet which gives us confidence in our ability to deploy capital, balanced between our four key capital allocation priorities, internal investment, strategic M&A, opportunistic share repurchases, and maintaining a reasonable dividend. In addition to these value creation drivers, our ESG strategy creates stakeholder value and is critical to delivering our purpose.
This is something that is very important to our senior management, to our board, and broadly to our stakeholders. To provide an overview of our ESG strategy, I'll now turn the presentation over to Susan Lorenz-Fisher, Senior Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability.
Thanks so much, Jim, for that great kickoff. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to all of you about environmental, social, and governance at AmerisourceBergen and how we're bringing that to life through our company purpose. As Jim said, I'm Susan Lorenz-Fisher. I lead Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability at AB, and part of that role specifically is our internal management specific governance on all things ESG, as well as our ESG external disclosures and reporting. I'm gonna start by just giving everyone an overview of how we define ESG at AmerisourceBergen. It goes without saying that our purpose really grounds and inspires the work of our global team members, and it absolutely guides how we are approach our commitment to being good industry stewards, which really ultimately makes a positive impact on our environmental, social, and governance commitments.
We're really encouraged by our continued progress on ESG, and we specifically see that globally. Obviously, a year ago today, we entered into the integration process with Alliance Healthcare, and that really gave us a wonderful platform as an organization to look at what Alliance Healthcare was doing in terms of what they defined ESG and really find some synergies. We went through a total refresh of our programs, and what I'm presenting you all today is really our new globally really focused ESG strategy. We'll talk about how we organize our ESG efforts, and we really look at them in three key areas. Purpose-driven team members, this is our first pillar, and we see this as embodying many aspects of the AB culture, like team member engagement, as well as fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Resilient and sustainable operations. In this focus area, we really embed efficiency and responsibility in how we deliver medications and other healthcare services. Our third pillar, Healthy communities at all. With this pillar, we really lean in on equitable access to healthcare services across the global communities and patient populations that we serve. Now that I've given this high-level overview, we're gonna dig in a little bit, and I'm gonna go over some specific successes of each of these three areas. Then I'm gonna close with a review of how we actually integrate and govern ESG at AmerisourceBergen. We'll start with purpose-driven team members. It goes without saying that we really look to create a positive work environment for our team members.
We want everyone to be in a place where they can thrive and find opportunities to grow. Team member development is a really big focus for us as a company, and we've done several new things over the past couple of years to really focus on that. We have a new integrated talent framework. This includes a leadership competency model that you heard about in the beginning of this presentation, enterprise learning strategy, and a much more modern approach to performance management. We have a number of other career advancement tools and opportunities that we offer to leadership, professional development programs, tuition reimbursement, and the opportunity to get out there in a community and volunteer. Since the onset of COVID-19, we've really focused on prioritizing the health and well-being of our team members.
During this time, this wellness focus let us really think about what our team members needed as they pivoted and changed in light of the very challenging circumstances we were all facing. We added emergency daycare coverage, an extra week of caregiver leave, and also expanded our parental leave policy. Another thing that we offered to many of our team members during this time is something that we call our AmerisourceBergen Team Member Assistance Fund. This is really set up to support our team members who are impacted by some type of life-altering catastrophe.
We have about 2,000 team members that pay into this fund and donate into it on an annual basis, and we're really proud to say that over the last year, $125,000 of that donated money has actually gone back to our team members in need. It's a program we're really proud of that really shows that we step in and support our associates. When we reflect back on the past couple of years, there's been a lot of lessons learned from our operations during the pandemic, and that's let us really create a new framework for flexible work going forward. We call this hybrid model something called Work Smart, and we see it really being based on principle of flexibility with a focus on employee experience, trust, and inclusion.
All of this wouldn't be where it is today without our focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's so critical to our 42,000 team members around the world, and we have a great chief diversity officer who's really accelerating our diversity, equity, and inclusion journey. Some of the objectives of this team over the next couple of months are really to increase diversity at every level, and building a culture of inclusion as well as strengthening our overall community impact. We see a lot of opportunities to look into the business, promote and enable diversity within independent pharmacy ownership, look at DEI-focused training for a number of our people managers, and really utilize the United Nations Global Compact relationship that we have in this area. We've also made a lot of progress over the past year. We have eight employee resource groups.
That was a new number for us. We added two, and we saw an 80% improvement in the number of team members who wanted to join on to those groups. A really exciting and impactful statistic for us at AB. Our gender pay equity metrics also show that female employees in the U.S. are paid 99.4 cents for every dollar that a male employee earns. We're also very proud of this number. In March 2022, to further show our support of gender equality, AmerisourceBergen signed on to the United Nations Women's Empowerment Principles. We really see and believe that strong ESG and DEI practices create value for our team members, all of our stakeholders, and ultimately shareholders. That said, our DEI efforts also reach outside of AmerisourceBergen through our supplier diversity initiatives.
We see an important role for the company in really championing the success of small and diverse-owned businesses as they play a critical role in the economy. We put into place a new supplier diversity strategy, and we're working on ways to measure our overall impact in this area. We directed a $25 million money market fund to Liberty Bank, which is a Black-owned bank in New Orleans, through J.P. Morgan's Empower Money Market Share Class. We also have a number of initiatives in place with many of our functional teams, where we're weaving supplier diversity into their existing practices as well as many customer-facing initiatives. We're now gonna move on to our second pillar, resilient and sustainable operations. We really see our purpose of creating healthier futures aligning with our commitment of addressing climate change and other environmental concerns.
To that end, over the past year, we've reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by about 4.6% against our FY 2019 baseline. We also conducted a very detailed and highly technical Scope 3 emissions assessment, which looks at the carbon footprint of our entire value chain. You might be wondering how we as a company got that 4.6% reduction. I'll give you two quick examples. Alliance Healthcare in the Netherlands uses hybrid vans to do a number of their deliveries. These vans make up about 34% of their total fleet. It's been a great practice and one that we're looking to expand in many other parts of the world. Renewables is another big one for us. About 20% of our electricity globally is from renewable energy, and so we're looking more and more at opportunities to really expand that.
A term many of you have probably been hearing about quite a bit the past year is called the Science Based Targets initiative. AmerisourceBergen formally submitted our science-based target last month for validation, and we're hoping to have that formally validated target in early 2023. We're also strongly committed to recycling and the reduction of waste generation all around our operations. As a quick example, our U.S. and Alliance Healthcare locations achieved about an 80% waste diversion in 2021, and we're looking at innovative and strategic steps to really apply circular economy principles into other parts of our operations. A great example of this is our American Health Packaging location where we repackage into blister packs for health systems. For years, that team has been trying to find a partner to help them recycle manufacturer stock bottles. They finally did.
It's been in a pilot phase for about six months now, and they've already recycled thousands of pill bottles in that time. It's a great example, one we're looking to expand. It also follows a model that we've had in place for years, where we recycle the totes that we use that you saw in many of the videos today. When they reach their end of life, they're recycled and remanufactured into new totes. Another great example of how we're supporting our customers in this area is that at one of our distribution centers in Kentucky, our engineering and operations team put into place an automatic packing system that right-sizes customer packages. It's paper-based, and it improves employee health and safety. We also are always looking for ways to partner with our customers to align around shared values and collective action.
In our animal health business, we worked with a customer to consolidate orders, and in that, we are able to give them really specific measurement details from those consolidated orders on what their environmental impact savings are, and we continually look for new opportunities to do that in other places. We'll now move on to our next pillar and talk a little bit about healthy communities for all. I'm sure you've heard from many of the speakers today that AmerisourceBergen truly makes a positive impact on our communities through equitable access to healthcare around the world. What you're gonna hear a little bit about from me on this pillar is how we do that both commercially and philanthropically.
Through our family of companies during the COVID-19 pandemic, we've really been able to support communities with antibody and antiviral treatments in the U.S., vaccines in 30+ countries, and testing in the U.K. The AB Foundation has also donated over $2 million to nonprofits who are on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer a number of solutions, including home infusion and direct-to-patient clinical trials that improve patient access in more than 75 countries. We also recently announced a program designed to help hospitals and health systems launch or optimize home infusion service lines. Our biopharma capabilities support global pharmaceutical innovation and bring new therapies to market to improve patient outcomes and advance health equity. To that end, last year, AB collectively supported nearly $5 million in product donations to charities globally, a number we're really proud of.
Other ways we've advanced health equity includes our partnership with the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program. Through this, Good Neighbor Pharmacy has helped to support allocation of five million COVID-19 vaccine doses to more than 1,600 pharmacies nationwide. One of the interesting statistics here is that nearly 50% of the individuals who are vaccinated by pharmacies in this network live in zip codes with a high social vulnerability index. Our efforts to advance health equity extend to the AmerisourceBergen Foundation. This past year, we held our 3rd nonprofit partner conference, where we bring together between 50 and 100 of our nonprofit partners to best practice share and learn from each other and focus on capacity building. The foundation continues to have a lasting impact. In fiscal year 2021, we granted more than $7.7 million to a 100+ nonprofit organizations.
In response to the geopolitical crisis in Eastern Europe, the AB Foundation has committed $ half a million to support the humanitarian response in and around Ukraine. Recipient organizations include many of our partners like Americares, Direct Relief, International Health Partners, just to name a few. Another $250,000 came directly from our team members in 30-plus countries who donated into our matching gift program in support of Ukraine relief efforts. We've also supported through in-kind donations of critical medical supplies, something we're really proud of and plan to continue doing as we monitor the situation. We'll move into our next subject here and talk a little bit about how we really integrate these three pillars into a sound governance process across AmerisourceBergen.
At AmerisourceBergen, a foundation of ethics, integrity, and transparency truly underpins our approach to integrating ESG considerations into our business decisions and operations. Our ESG strategy and efforts are overseen by the board and receive support from the highest levels of our company. The board's Governance, Sustainability, and Corporate Responsibility Committee has oversight of ESG reporting and disclosure practices as well as our ESG strategy. The committee is updated quarterly and provide great partnership in guiding our strategy and monitoring performance. Additionally, the compensation and succession planning committee is evaluating new ways to integrate an ESG metric in determining executive compensation. At a management level, we have something in place called the Global ESG Impact Council that's comprised of a cross-functional group of senior management.
Many of my colleagues who have joined me here today participate in that council, and we really lean on the council to bring AmerisourceBergen's efforts to embrace a company-wide ESG approach, make sure we're integrating ESG considerations throughout the business and ensure accountability. We're about a year into something we have in place called a three-year ESG integration plan, where we have several different, very detailed tactics that are in place to advance our ESG vision and governance, enhance engagement with stakeholders, and really build measurements and accountability around our initiatives so that it's cross-functional and well understood across the organization. Strong ESG reporting is absolutely critical to how we continue our journey in ESG as a company. It lets us track progress along our journey and also be reflective on where we wanna go in the future.
Last year, in fiscal 2021, we released our sixth annual sustainability report and ESG reporting index. We align with several voluntary frameworks and standards. There's a lot of them, I won't mention them all. Just a couple of highlights, Global Reporting Initiative, SASB, Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I wanted to call out too, that several key metrics in this report are externally assured, and this is actually the fourth year that we've gone through this process and gotten the information audited. Last August, we joined the United Nations Global Compact and are really excited about releasing our C ommunication on Progress in just a couple of months.
We're also partnering with a number of trade organizations as we really wanna elevate the understanding of our industry and the critical ESG metrics that are a part of that and help tell our story. We're really committed to advancing our ESG initiatives in years to come, and we're driven by our purpose in being united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. We really look forward to keeping all of you updated on our journey and efforts to make a positive impact on the planet and communities around the world. With that, I'll thank everybody for the time today to talk about our ESG journey and hand the mic back over to Bennett.
Thank you. Please bear with us as we prepare the stage for Q&A.
If you maybe grab one, I'll grab the other one.
We're on far, middle, and then here.
That's good.
Good.
There's space here.
Yeah, space.
Hold on. Oh, no. I'm just.
Thank you. For the first question, we'll go to Lisa Gill with J.P. Morgan.
Okay, great.
Thanks very much. First off, thank you for hosting us today, and it's so nice to see you all in person. Jim, I just want to go back and just have a little bit of a better understanding on what you're talking about for 2023. I know you're not giving specific guidance at this time, but you talked about operating profit growth of 5%, half the COVID contribution, which would be $0.35, and overall EPS growth of 8%. One, that's a little on the lower side, right? When we think about the midpoint of your guidance. Can you talk about what your expectations are in 2023 versus the longer term when we think about growth rates? Then secondly, when we think about the COVID contribution, do I have that correct?
When we think about what base it's growing off of, would that then be $1,045-$1,070 and then 8% on top of that? I just wanna make sure we have the numbers right.
Yeah, sure. Let me try to address all of that, Lisa. Thank you very much also for being here in person today. For fiscal year 2023, let me start off by saying it's early. You know, we haven't gone through our full planning process, and we'll be, you know, going through that over the summer, and we'll be announcing fiscal year 2023 guidance in November. Also, I'll say, you know, we're coming off of three years of really terrific growth over the last three years, and it's early, but we did kind of wanted to give an indication of directionally what we're looking at.
Yeah, if you kind of take our fiscal year 2022 guidance of $10.80-$11.05 and, you know, as a kind of a baseline, you back out the $0.70, which is our COVID contribution that we talked about on our last earnings call for fiscal year 2022, and then look at 8% growth, which of course would be, you know, 5% organic operating income growth that we talked about and 3% from capital deployment. It's lower capital deployment growth in fiscal year 2023 because we've been de-leveraging from Alliance. We've been de-leveraging in 2022 and in 2023, so that impacts capital deployment growth in 2023. Then add in a number for COVID benefit on top of that.
What we said today is, you know, COVID benefit could easily be less than half of what it was in 2022. It could be less than half of that in 2023. Pick a number for COVID benefit and add that back in. That kind of gives an idea of fiscal year 2023. Again, I'll say it's, you know, it's early, but fiscal year 2023, we, you know, have indicated in the 5% range rather than something at six, seven or eight, which would be our long-term guidance. You know, just keep in mind that we've been integrating Alliance. We're coming off of three years of terrific growth. We might still be experiencing some inflation, some cost inflation in fiscal year 2023.
Of course, that impacts our business less than it impacts most, but it, you know, still may have some impact. We wanted to give that sort of indication. I'll also say, we do have a high degree of confidence in our, you know, execution. We have a high degree of confidence in our momentum. When we give that, you know, kind of indication for 2023, it's something that we have, you know, a great deal of confidence in. Lisa.
Next, we'll go to Steve Valiquette with Barclays.
Yeah, hi. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. My question, I guess, is somewhat similar to Lisa's. I wanted to just hone in on the 8%-12% long-term growth guidance. Just to confirm, is that off of the higher fiscal 2022 EPS base reported, or is that off the $0.70 lower EPS base? Or is it meant to incorporate it, you know, either way, I guess? I just wanna confirm the, you know, the proper jump-off point for the 8%-12%.
Yeah. The, you know, the proper jump-off point, you know, depends upon what's gonna be the COVID impact in 2023. I think what the, you know, the thing to do is to kind of back out the $0.70 to get to the baseline. Then we'd have, you know, the long-term growth of 8%-12%. We feel, as I said, you know, kinda confident in getting to that double-digit EPS CAGR during the LRP. Then you'd have to kinda add in on top of that what you think the COVID impact would be, Steve.
Okay. We could all theoretically adjust that 8%-12% higher, for what's gonna be reported, you know, including COVID from what it sounds like. That's hard for you to answer that, but I'll answer that for myself, I guess.
Yes, it would be positively impacted by whatever the COVID impact is in, say, 2023 and going forward.
Got it. Okay, thanks.
Next, we'll go to Ricky Goldwasser with Morgan Stanley.
Yeah, hi. Good morning. As we think about the long-term guidance beyond 2023, and you think about the biosimilar benefit that we kind of like expect to see there as a wave, 2023, 2024, 2025. In a year where you have a relatively higher biosimilars introduction to the market, should we assume sort of a EPS growth at a higher end of the range or that 12%? Just trying to think about how we should incorporate the biosimilar thinking. On the capital deployment, for our purposes, as we think about modeling, what is your working capital requirement? How much cash do you need to have on your balance sheet, kind of like every quarter, for working capital so we can think about what kind of like that excess cash flow that can be deployed into buybacks.
You know, why don't we start. I'll start off with the biosimilar. We haven't incorporated into our long-range growth any particular biosimilar launches. Of course, as the audience well knows, you know, most impactful to us is the Part B biosimilars. We have been participating and have been an early adopter and have really encouraged the development of the biosimilar market. We are obviously very interested in the large patient-administered self-administered products like Humira will be you know is probably foremost in your mind. We're talking to all of our large customers, seeing what our role there could be. We're encouraged by you know the interchangeability criteria that we sometimes are seeing from the FDA.
It really displays some clinical open-mindedness, I guess, to the benefits of these therapies. We're also encouraged by, you know, providers' adoption and patients' acceptance, and also the professionalism and the type of companies that are manufacturing biosimilar products. We have said they are a very strong benefit to AmerisourceBergen, particularly with the services portfolio we have, along with businesses like ION and other contracting entities. We also, you know, when we look at one point I wish I'd said in my presentation, I'll say it now: We also are in the non-oncology therapeutics for physician-administered products, neurology, ophthalmology, dermatology, rheumatology.
We are developing tremendous capabilities there as well, and that's gonna be a good growth driver for us further, and we'll look to give you guidance as we get more visibility into those product pipelines. Jim?
Yeah, thanks, Steve, and I'll address the working capital part of it, and that's a very good question. As you're doing your modeling and looking at receivables and inventory and payables, I would assume that it's comparable to what you'd see at AmerisourceBergen in the recent past. In fact, the funny thing is, Steve and I actually just this morning were talking about working capital and nothing to do with this meeting. We were just kinda talking about receivables and inventories and payables. I guess that's the sort of thing that we talk about. I...
As you do your modeling, I would assume, you know, and working capital is very favorable for our company and our industry, and I would assume in the modeling that that continues over the LRP, Rikki. Thanks.
Next, we'll go to George Hill with Deutsche Bank.
Yeah. Good morning, guys, and thanks for taking the question. Jim and Steve, I think most U.S. investors have become accustomed to the idea that the international market is a slower growing market than the U.S. market from a profit perspective, at least. I guess, can you maybe deconstruct what you're seeing as the growth drivers in the international market versus the U.S. market that allow international operating earnings growth to keep pace with what's historically been a faster-growing U.S. market?
Thanks, George. You know, great question. You know, we start with our U.K. business, which is a tremendous business, anchored by Boots, but also by very strong Alloga and a direct-to-pharmacy business, which is also now called the Solus contracts. Alliance Healthcare has got a tremendous footprint there. We more and more are exporting the Alloga footprint to Europe. We're showing tremendous success in Spain. We've got a lot of effort in Paris. In fact, next week, we gonna be in France and the Netherlands looking at some of our retail models, but also hopefully visiting some pharmacies and trying to establish, you know, what the specialty footprint could look like.
In the long range, we also are confident in the synergies. We need a more uniform commercial contracting capability and technology throughout Alliance, and we will be getting that over the next few years. Part of our model assumes a lot of investment into the infrastructure, particularly technology, which will enable us to be the commercialization service partner for businesses like World Courier, ICS, some of the more advanced, you know, medical alert notification work that we do in the U.S. We've had good success with this. We're taking models that are successful in one market and really transporting it. I'll give you another example where we are benefiting.
Recently we had one of Bob's really former economist, in a way you could explain it, really going and trying to help understand how we price specialty products in the U.S. You know, there's just a lot of thinking there, and as we grapple with new pricing models. In fact, one of the markets in Europe is more interested in specialty products being dispensed at a pharmacy because post-COVID, they see that as an advantage, and they also see it as a more efficient side of care, more accessible to patients. We really wanna help generate those trends. We also will invest. There's some interesting capital deployment opportunities. We'll invest to cement and consolidate some businesses. We...
You know, very thoughtfully, I think AmerisourceBergen prides ourselves on being excellent fiduciaries of our shareholders' capital, and you'll see that same discipline and rigor applied to Europe.
Steve, I'll add one quick thing there. This is one thing we've talked about throughout our meeting today, is that our business, you know, we have the foundation in distribution, and then we have the higher margin, higher growth businesses. As we said during the presentation, in Europe at Alliance and including World Courier, of course, the higher margin, higher growth businesses are a higher percentage of operating income in our International Healthcare Solutions segment than in our U.S. Healthcare Solutions segment. If those higher margin businesses are, as we expect, higher growth, that is one thing that is accretive and helpful to growth of our international business.
Last, yeah, international healthcare segment also includes World Courier, which has been a terrific and consistent grower.
Next, we'll go to Charles Rhyee with Cowen.
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to follow up maybe on the last one there about international. If we look at the preliminary guidance here in 2023, right, 5%, can you maybe talk a little bit about assumptions in international, particularly around FX? When we think about maybe the longer term, 5%-8% op income growth in international, again, maybe your thoughts on where you see FX in that, as well as does that include the $75 million synergies that you announced at the time of the deal? I have a follow-up.
Yeah, sure. That long-term growth rate for Alliance of 5%-8%, that is on a constant currency basis. FX has been a headwind in fiscal year 2022, of course, as we've you know, talked about and made apparent. Really, Alliance's performance in fiscal year 2022, even on an as-reported basis, has been quite good and on a constant currency or budgeted currency basis has been quite good. But you know, as we talk about 5%-8% long term at Alliance, it's on a constant currency basis. In terms of 2023, we've just kinda said the 5%.
We haven't broken it down by business at this point in time, and we would, you know, do that as part of our detailed planning process.
Great. If I could just follow up. Capital deployment, 3% here in fiscal 2023. You guys announced recently, right, the resumption of share repurchases, you know, at the time of, you know, Walgreens making a sale of shares and kinda signaling to the market that, hey, look, you know, we are here to support shareholders, and we've done a great job in terms of deleveraging our balance sheet. Any ability to perhaps accelerate that and maybe in conjunction with that, you know, in the future if, you know, your large shareholder were to, you know, look to do a sale, is that something that you could do in a more structured way, where you can intervene versus, having a transaction necessarily go to the market?
Yeah. So thank you for the question. We are, you know, in discussions with Walgreens, and we would expect to cooperate with them on any future sales. You know, the new board authorization was very important to that discussion. You know, we would participate depending on our capital situation. If you look at, I really enjoyed Jim's slide there, where it looked at how we've deployed capital historically. Obviously, the $6.7 billion over the last five years was largely driven by Alliance, and that brought tremendous accretion to our shareholders. You saw the almost $2 billion in dividends, about $2.1 billion in share repurchases. At the moment, you know, we think there's tremendous value in our shareholders.
We've overall done very well for our shareholders by buying shares back and being capital efficient. Certainly there's an appetite in the market as we saw a few weeks ago for those shares, and we continue to work collaboratively to make it you know as little disruption as possible.
Steve, may I add something?
Sure.
Charles, you know, also along this line, I've been involved with the, you know, Walgreens relationship since day one, and there's Walgreens the customer, and then there's Walgreens the investor. I just, as we go through this process and we work through it's really important that you all know how strong our relationship is with Walgreens the customer. The things that we're doing on a day-to-day basis, both operationally and strategically, are as strong as they've been really throughout our relationship. Different part of your question, but I just think it's important to put that out there.
Next, we'll go to Eric Coldwell with Baird.
Thanks very much. I have two. One is very big picture strategic, and then one's a little more tactical. On the first one, I'm curious what your thoughts are on recession planning, the pros and cons of the ABC model, any strategy or tactical changes that you perhaps might be adopting as you think about the economy, what's going on globally. Just a ton of conversations out there from strategists and pundits on, you know, this potential move into a recession. I'm curious how your scenario planning is playing out as you think about that and how you think about your business activities over the next one or two years.
Yeah, I can start out, maybe we can let Bob give some perspective as well. Look, I made the comment in my talk about the 1.5% operating margins, you know, 150 basis points. We're very mindful of all those basis points. A lot of the lower margins get driven by our core distribution business, and that's governed by reimbursement and a contracting process with large customers. AmerisourceBergen has many of the largest customers in the United States, including Walgreens, but also companies like Kaiser and Express Scripts that demand a very good cost of goods sold.
I'm extremely proud of the way we've gone through the contracting process and been able to preserve value for our business and our shareholders. You know, we're dealing with low cube capacity products, so that has been helpful from a transportation perspective. We also have got a lot of logistical expertise, prowess, and you know, even some of the ESG work that we're doing has enabled our businesses to be more efficient. Our customers are more interested in recycling those sort of aspects, and that does help. Also interested in you know, delivery efficiencies, but they do need often their deliveries at a certain time. You know, we've also been focused on wage inflation. We are seeing a benefit from paying higher wages to the frontline workforce in terms of retention.
Typically, we see a worker, as they stay with us for over a year, being very getting into that purpose and getting into the culture, seeing the strong benefit programs we offer. There is a benefit to really making sure we bring in associate at an attractive wage and then letting them really get integrated into the company culture. We're seeing some benefit from that. Look, I anticipate that there's been tremendous spending by governments in most of the large countries we operate in. There will be budget constraints that come in at some stage. Of course, you know, politicians and the electorate will demand that.
We maintain that pharmaceuticals are the most efficient form of healthcare, often, you know, overestimated as to what the impact is on global healthcare spending. You know, here in the U.S., people think it's 30, 40%, you know, and it's are often surprised to learn it's under 15%. We also will see benefit from what Rikki talked about, the biosimilar wave coming, a lot of patent expirations and new, you know, targeted therapies. We believe that our position is very defensible, and certainly I feel the economics at AmerisourceBergen is extremely defensible to all the parties that we contract with, including manufacturers and providers. I'm sorry, last point I just have to make.
You know, when the pandemic started, Jim said we were talking this morning about receivables and cash flow and payables. You know, I grew up in South Africa. We would have, you know, massive devaluations in the South African rand, and the economy was very dependent on the gold price, so we're used to a lot of cycles. Perhaps part of that, you know, reaction process was to really get worried about receivables, same as I did in 2008 and 2009. In 2009, we lost $4 million. It was one of the lowest bad debt years we had in our core business. I think you just can't understate the resiliency of the healthcare economy, because that does distinguish us, and it's really part of AmerisourceBergen's operating model.
We had very consistent trends throughout the pandemic. We didn't really see our quality of our receivables deteriorate much, whatever class of trade we were servicing. That's something I think you really need to appreciate about AmerisourceBergen. Bob, talk about inflation.
Yeah. Yeah, Steve, I think I can add a couple things. One, maybe start where you ended, and I was gonna go right to historically, you know, demand holds up in our businesses in recessions, and we've seen that over time. I think, you know, depending on where that goes, I think we're confident we'll see traffic in physician offices, hospitals, pharmacies, veterinary hospitals. Secondly, this was a core part of my presentation. We're always working on being more efficient, right? That's to make sure that we can meet the needs of our customers. If they're feeling pressure because of a recession, it could be because of inflation, but we're always working on making sure that we can find room to manage that. That's a core part of what we do and certainly a very important part as we go forward.
I think lastly, Eric, I think the innovation, you know, that we've talked about, kind of in any cycle that we're going through, the kind of the incremental growth that we'll get from new services is really important, and we're committed to doing that.
Bob, if I can just finish up on that, my follow-up was actually about the innovation and what you see from some observers is they suggest companies should maybe back off innovation a little bit and focus on the debt reduction, buybacks when shares are cheap, cash flow, things of that sort, and let the long-term investment strategy come when the market's more willing to accept it and believe in it. My follow-on question was, can you give us a sense on, we've got the broader framework of your earnings outlook, but can you give a sense on the investment spending, CapEx versus OpEx? How dilutive are these investments? What the payback periods are?
I know you said 50 different projects, but if you could give us some overarching sense, you know, so we're not maybe caught off guard with a really big M&A event at some point or something else.
Yeah. Eric, I'll give you a kind of a top line, and then I'll kick it over to Jim to see if he wants to take it any deeper. I will say these are investments that we make within the context of our yearly planning and are certainly contemplated in our LRP. The numbers that Jim talked about, you know, through this period contemplate the level of investment that we're talking about. Secondly, you know, we expect to find room for these investments. You know, one of the things we work hard on again is if we wanna do something new, we wanna find something that maybe we can stop doing to fund that. They're not all incremental, and they are contemplated in our go-forward guidance.
Yeah. Bob, I'll just quickly add that these innovation types of CapEx and OpEx, they're within the normal range that you've seen historically of AmerisourceBergen's CapEx and OpEx. I think the point that Bob just made is just so key, is that we're always looking for savings opportunities to be able to fund those sorts of things, so they aren't incremental. In terms of the, you know, capital deployment we have in the LRP, you know, those sorts of, you know, acquisitions and share repurchases, they are, you know, a key part of our LRP. These innovation expenditures kind of fall within the normal CapEx and normal OpEx that you would've seen historically.
Next, we'll go to Elizabeth Anderson with Evercore ISI.
Hi. Thanks so much. Just maybe sticking on the capital deployment, you talked about some potential M&A in the mix, in the future mix. Are there any particular areas that you would call out in terms of things that you're currently interested? I know that right now you're obviously still integrating Alliance, et cetera, but sort of just as we sort of think about the long-term outlook.
Yeah. Steve, I'll start, kind of talk about the financial aspect of it, and then I'm sure you'll wanna finish with areas of interest. You know, as we look at the LRP and what our contribution is from capital deployment, you know, we said 3%-4% and really kind of 3% fiscal year 2023 because we're deleveraging from Alliance in 2022 and 2023 and then a 4% CAGR after that. Even at that 4% CAGR in our LRP at the level of capital deployment it takes, which is meaningful to get to that CAGR, even at that level, every year in our LRP, we see our credit metrics improving, and we see our credit availability increasing and our firepower increasing.
It does leave room for additional M&A and additional share repurchases at the right time. You know, keep in mind that we're coming off a year where we had you know very big accretion from the Alliance acquisition. As we look at the way our LRP is built, you know, we do have excess credit capacity to do additional things when the right opportunities arise. We think that is strategic. We think to have that strong balance sheet to be able to do those sorts of things is strategic, and it's a differentiator.
It's what enabled Alliance when we were able to put $3 billion of cash into the Alliance acquisition because we have this excess capacity on our balance sheet to drive even more returns from capital deployment.
You know, I tell you the most emails I've had in recent memory is when we launched the venture capital fund. You know, I'm kind of a talkative guy, friendly guy, so just about everyone I know in the world came out with some idea. You know, it's actually a very good strategy for us. AmerisourceBergen is well-known as a home where we respect entrepreneurs, and we do particularly well with founder-led businesses. They tend to transition well to us. Even though MWI was a public company, there were really aspects of that. Culturally, that's been the, you know, that has been an excellent acquisition for us. World Courier was also a founder-led company. Xcenda was a founder-led company.
As we're attracting even stronger talent that has been out in broader areas, you know, one area I'd point to where we've shown an ability to invest and really drive further value is the health systems area in the US. Such a strong area for AmerisourceBergen. Wasn't always that way, and really helps us because not only do we have high market share, we also are leading with market leaders. We've got some of the best health systems in the country, and we are much more relevant to the overall economics conversation, whether it's helping their pharmacies be more efficient, whether it's helping them with logistics, whether it's helping them with their outpatient strategy. I feel that's a really good example of how we built up an ecosystem.
Of course, you know our very many examples in oncology. That's one way. We also will do geographic expansion, not only for Alliance, but also for Animal Health, where we find the right opportunities, the right sort of matches. In the clinical trial logistics area, World Courier's been a great home for us. We've done a couple of more on the investment in development, you know, like in cell and gene therapy, we've developed a lot of new technologies that you'll see come into the marketplace in a few years, which will make be more efficient, more ESG friendly. Bob Mauch is leading our businesses in the U.S. Tremendous amount of interest in adherence and access services.
Bob, just quickly note any particular areas you have of interest in.
Yeah, I think if we—we certainly emphasized, you know, biopharma services, you know, throughout our presentation today. We believe that our reputation that we have in the U.S., the strong businesses that we have in the U.S., in addition to the footprint that we now have, in particular in Western Europe, gives us a real opportunity to add on services whether we build, buy, partner in that to make sure that we can go to market to the biopharma manufacturers with new innovations, right? I think when I think about how we're gonna, you know, deliver the numbers in the longer term, we believe that we'll be providing incremental and new and innovative services to global biopharma manufacturers, you know, starting with the small and mid-size, but certainly not exclusive to them, including the largest.
you know, it's certainly an emphasis in biopharma services. We think our footprint makes that more attractive, and we hope to use the expertise at Alliance Healthcare, the expertise at AmerisourceBergen, and the appetite of the biopharma manufacturers to innovate new services.
Okay, great. That was really helpful. Maybe just one quick follow-up. Just in terms of when you were talking about the potential FY 2023 COVID contribution, maybe of half the rate of what we're seeing in 2022.
Yeah.
Is there anything that you have in terms of visibility into that right now, or is that kind of just a placeholder until we get sort of more information later in the year?
Honestly, it is a placeholder. You know, it really will depend a lot on the oral therapies. A lot of our business right now and how they develop, do they become regular approved products versus EUA products? You know, because the distribution models, as I said in my presentation, are different and the impact to the financials. You know, even though we work obviously on a, you know, a fair fee but a modest fee, we get 100% of the market when we're doing these limited distribution programs. It is something that we expect. As these products become more available, including, we believe, the vaccine, we hope that they'll go through the efficiencies of the general distribution channel.
We expect, I'd say with the therapies, we might hope that they stay the way they are, but financially.
Next we go to Michael Cherny with BofA.
Great. Thanks, everyone. Trying to wrap up, I think, a few different questions, but you talked, Jim, a lot about the long-term guidance and what could be upside drivers, getting to the 12% or potentially higher M&A and having more balancing capability if biosimilars were to come. As you think about the downside case, 8%, I think, versus your historical CAGR would be on the low end. Obviously, it seems like you're gonna generally point us in that ballpark, give or take, for next year. As you think about that long-term trajectory, what has to happen, call it go wrong, call it grow slower, that puts you in that consistent 8% range, give or take, that's where you end up in various different years?
Yeah. First of all, as we, you know, do our business planning internally and we think about these sorts of things, we're all kind of wired to say, "What is it that we need to do in order to get to the high end of our range?" Not, you know, what's gonna happen to drive us to the low end of our range. I think that's probably evidenced in our results and, you know, typically coming in, you know, towards the higher end as I'm sure you're all accustomed to. To answer your question, what are some of the things that could drive one to the lower end of the range? It would be, you know, things like is generic deflation more than we have expected in the plan?
Is inflation, you know, more than we have expected in the plan? I would have to say it would be like those macro sorts of things that would impact the industry that would drive us to the bottom end of the range, and I think it would be things like our execution that would kinda keep us from being at the bottom end of the range because, you know, we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to execute.
You know, one comment I'll make, we had a lovely chance to have dinner with our two board members who are with us today, and they are our longest tenured board members, which gives the benefit of being historians. We asked them at dinner, what are the two biggest changes that they've seen in the company? The one was, well, the people in AmerisourceBergen have always been well-intentioned, but the quality and the knowledge of the healthcare industry is so vastly improved. The other one was, I was particularly pleased about was, you know, we used to be a supply chain and distribution company, and now we really are a healthcare company that has deep understanding of healthcare economies in all the countries that we operate in.
I thought that's, you know, just such a good example of AmerisourceBergen being well-positioned and being in the right markets with the right sort of foundation blocks to build on. We also, I go back to some of the work we've done with the board. You know, we've actually really improved our operating margin, and we're very proud of that. It's, you know, we're doing so much business at low, operating margins in our distribution business in the U.S. with large customers. The fact that we have done that by the capital deployment and the impact of the higher margin businesses, like our oncology and specialty franchise, I think should also be noted today.
The next question will go to Eric Percher with Nephron Research.
Thank you. A question on the health system side, and two questions. I'll start with one and then come to the other. You've talked about the creation of specialty GPO services for health systems that are used to using GPO. So what was it that you created that was of value? Was it specific to the biosimilar opportunity, and do you see more value creation opportunities having established that?
I'll take it, yeah. Thank you for the question, Eric. If you think about, let's start with ION before we get to the health systems. What we have there is very integrated proposition kind of from, you know, manufacturer contracting through education to distribution. It's not literally integrated, but kind of there's a good workflow there. What we were able to offer and are able to offer the manufacturers and the health systems in these specialty products are some of those very same things. What the ION network and what these emerging networks in the health systems are able to do is really work on their clinical formulary, P&T.
You know, they're willing to make some choices of products in terms of clinical effectiveness that is advantageous from a manufacturer relationship standpoint as well as a clinical benefit, obviously. Those are some of the things that we're doing that don't necessarily happen in other traditional GPOs that we're getting some traction.
Also in health system, cell and gene therapy came up often, and it was interesting to hear about TrakCel and Lash working together. I think the other difficult part has been the last mile, and you mentioned that you've invested in cryo. Is there a scenario in which you would try to be the last mile across your health system and beyond? Does that require meaningful investment to get there? You know, could that be meaningful within this LRP season?
It's exactly, Eric, and I probably didn't emphasize it enough, but it's exactly what World Courier is doing. That's a core capability that we do on a global basis, including in North America. That last mile, that very specialized cryo, whether it's from the patient to the lab or from the lab back to the patient, is something that we're a leader in, frankly. We would expect to continue that, and it would be part of our normal growth and certainly contemplated within our LRP.
Before we turn it over to Steve Collis for closing remarks, we'll take our last question from A.J. Rice with Credit Suisse.
Thanks. That puts a lot of pressure on, of course. Maybe two questions. One, to go back to your comments about M&A. It's not often that we see companies doing $6+ billion deals that are double-digit accretive in the first year. Does that make you look at international in a different way? Was that just a one-off, or are others selling when you're buying? There's opportunities perhaps to find other deals that have similar or attractive financials. Does it make you think about international a little more?
Well, you know, two tricks to that, and, Jim, of course, is the expert. First of all, we had, you know, over half of the acquisition firepower in our on our balance sheet, so we had a lot of. We had cash. Second of all, you know, it was a multiple which you can argue about for a distribution business. It was a fair multiple for the seller. You know, we're seeing a lot higher multiples. Now we're getting into a higher interest rate environment, which makes things a little bit more challenging. Also we expect that potentially, you know, the M&A market and the private equity companies, it used to be that we could compete very easily as a strategic with the private equity companies.
We're seeing some very high multiples for the type of businesses that we're interested in, you know, data analytics, high-end commercialization businesses. Those are the areas that we very much would like to play. We hope we see a market that's a little bit more rational with investors expecting higher returns from sponsors. I think it could be productive for us. International, there's no panacea there. We also, Bob, you made some great comments about Walgreens, but part of doing this deal was really we had studied our relationship with Walgreens, which started in earnest in 2013, so nearly 10 years. This was a way that we wanted to best define our long-range partnership by having one global wholesale business.
I think that it was the best solution for how we work together in the long run, you know, and we're gonna continue to work with Walgreens irrespective of their shareholding. We have the Boots investment. We have the Walgreens contract through 2029. We have the WBAD, you know, sourcing, contracting, and many other opportunities that Bob pointed out, including, you know, last mile and central fill type opportunities. I think that's a bit how we think about it.
The other question I had was, I think, Steve, your prepared remarks, you mentioned, that the pandemic and stuff you'd done around, the vaccines and so forth, allowed you to enhance your relationship with, the federal government, the government customer, as you described it. Are there anything about that or other things that you did in the pandemic that give you new opportunities as we come out of the pandemic to pursue other business opportunities with some of those customers?
Yeah, I think as the budget situation settles down, you know, the administration will look in the U.S. at what the long-range sourcing opportunity is and should we be doing nearshoring and how do we ensure we have the right type of supply. I think our relationship is really positioning us very well to help be a part of that discussion. You know, the work we did on the strategic national stockpile, of course, we have been privileged to be the DOD's distributor for many years, and we enjoy that relationship. We also, Bob's team, we've contracted with for vaccine distribution with the state of California, for example. That's gone very well. They've re-upped with us, and there are other states that are working with us.
Again, we think that that AmerisourceBergen profile being, you know, rising with with a lot of these entities is gonna give us opportunity. Bob has appointed new leadership in that area, in the government affairs area, because we do see that as a fruitful area. Certainly, in Europe, we're working very closely with the different health systems and the vaccine manufacturers, and we'll continue to do so. I must say that we were very much looking forward to this, and I hope the event met everyone's expectations. I felt the quality of the information was outstanding. You know, special thanks to Susan, who did this for the first time, and I hope you see that we are serious about our ESG and diversity footprint.
I could not be more proud, of course, Jim, of the work that you did. Bennett, you and your team were outstanding. You schooled us so well, and actually, somehow you do it without taking too much of my time, which I really appreciate. Bob, I thought your slides were absolutely outstanding, really helped bringing the strategy and the growth drivers to life with some very tangible examples. Thanks to everyone at all the AmerisourceBergen team, people like Mel and Laz who are here to support us as well. We really appreciate it. Kelly and Andrea, our executive assistants.
We very much appreciate this time, and we do hope that you took note of our key takeaways, and note our confidence in our ability to carry on as a purpose-led company that is driving differentiated shareholder value. Thank you for your time today.