All right. Good morning, everyone. Steve Baxter, the Healthcare Services Analyst here at Wells Fargo. We're very pleased to have Cencora with us today. As I'm sure all of you know, Cencora is one of the largest drug distributors in the U.S. and also operates a lot of interesting pharma services businesses in addition to an international portfolio of businesses. From the company, we're happy to have CFO Jim Cleary and Head of IR and Treasury Bennett Murphy. Thanks again for being here. Did you want to make any opening remarks, or should we just kind of jump right into the questions?
Sure. I'll just take a couple of minutes to make opening remarks. First of all, Stephen, thank you for inviting us and having us here. It's great for Bennett to have this opportunity, and I appreciate everyone coming to the session this morning. I'll talk just a couple of minutes about Cencora. First of all, you know, our purpose. We're united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. That guides everything we do as a company. We're united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. I want to talk about our three growth priorities and our four strategic drivers. I'll be very brief in talking about these three growth priorities and four strategic drivers. The first of our growth priorities is to lead with market leaders. We aim to have a market-leading customer in every one of our businesses.
For instance, Walgreens and our large corporate pharmacy part of our business, and leading health systems throughout the company. I'll just throw out MD Anderson as one of the many examples. You know, leaders really across the business, including the MSOs that we do business with in the specialty physician services market. Our second growth priority is strengthening our position in specialty markets. Specialty pharmaceuticals has really been the driver of our growth, and we want to continue to strengthen our position in specialty pharmaceuticals. You'll see that through our operating actions and also through our capital deployment. A third growth priority is we want to enhance patient access to pharmaceuticals. You'll see this in a lot of things that we do with upstream customers and we do with downstream customers.
I'll give you one example of that: all the work we've done on the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, where we're really playing a key role in enhancing patient access to pharmaceuticals. Those are the three strategic priorities. We have four drivers, four strategic drivers for our business, that really enable those three growth priorities. The first is digital transformation. This is something that's very important to our company, and we're very focused on it. It's really all across the company. I'll give you just one example, and that's in the finance department because it's something I have responsibility for. Over the next three years, our goal in finance is right now we spend 80% of our time generating reports and 20% of our time partnering with the business.
We're going to flip that so that we spend 20% of our time generating reports and 80% of our time partnering with the business, which can enable us to grow the business. That's something that we're definitely going to achieve. A second strategic driver for the business, and this one is very important and very important to our CEO, we're really going to prioritize growth-oriented investments. As we look across our portfolio, we're going to be really focusing on and prioritizing the highest growth opportunity investments. That means spending less on the lower growth opportunities. That's one thing that you'll see at Cencora is portfolio prioritization. A third strategic driver is productivity. This is something that we've given Bennett Murphy, who many of you know here, responsibility for. We're really going to be further building productivity capabilities and initiatives across the business to become even more effective and efficient.
We do a good job on that now, but it's really something that we're going to get even better at so that we can be more efficient and effective for our customer base. Of course, our fourth strategic driver is talent and culture, which is just going to be such an important part of what we do. As we have Bob Mauch at our helm now, these are the three growth priorities and four strategic drivers that our executive leadership team is really focused on. We've been very fortunate. Fiscal year 2025 has been a super strong year for us. It's been driven by our U.S. Healthcare Solutions segment. It's been driven by utilization trends. It's been driven by terrific growth in specialty. It's been a very nice year for us where we've had really broad-based strong growth across our U.S. business.
Of course, we've been increasing guidance several times throughout the year. The most recent time, we increased our EPS guidance to a range of $15.85- $16. That'll conclude my opening remarks. We're happy to answer any questions.
No, thank you. That's great. I think you're probably being quite modest about the strength in the business that you've seen this year, particularly on the U.S. side of things. I guess when we look at it and we see, obviously, there's some moving parts with acquisition and things like COVID, for example, in the numbers. When you look at what we would consider more of a core earnings growth rate and compare that to your long-term plan, you're running essentially more than two times the high end of your long-term target this year. As we step back and try to think about what's driving that and try to assess the sustainability of higher growth over the next couple of years, what are the most important two or three things that have enabled the company to grow so strongly this year?
Yeah. You know, it's a great question. I'm actually pleased to say that it's a little bit of a boring answer, for a good reason because it's really the same things that we've been calling out for quite some time. It's strong utilization trends. It is growth in sales of specialty products to physician practices and health systems where we are quite strong. It is kind of the broad-based results across our U.S. business. I mean, all of our U.S. businesses are performing and executing well. As we look at changes, really, they're incremental and around the edges. Like, as we look to fiscal year 2026, we'll have RCA for an extra quarter versus awhat we had it for in fiscal year 2025.
As we look at fiscal year 2026 on the downside, there's an oncology customer that was bought by one of our competitors that we'll have out of our numbers for three quarters in 2026 versus, we'll have it out of our numbers for four quarters in 2026, and we only had it out of our numbers for one quarter in 2025. That would be that incremental impact there. As we really look across the business, the fundamentals really remain quite strong with leading customers in all the segments. I just think value-added services and strong execution across the U.S. business.
Got it. I appreciate that context. Just to follow up on some of the conversation you had on the most recent earnings call as people start to think more about fiscal 2026, appreciating what your long-term guidance is and that you're not obviously changing your guidance as you sit here today, are there things that are more discreet that you might think present some kind of lapping issues or more discreet elements that could push you towards the long-range plan as we think about 2026? I'm just wondering about how you think about the sustainability versus just the prudence of having the guidance where you have it.
Yeah, that's an excellent question, and it is spot on. We will evaluate our long-term guidance every year. This is the time of the year that we do it, and we'll put long-term guidance out in November. I'm certainly not going to announce any changes to it here. We'll just evaluate all the moving pieces. We've really benefited from really strong recent performance that has outperformed our long-term guidance. On the other hand, we take a prudent look to the market and what the market might present over a number of years. One thing I will say is that we think this is an excellent market, and it's been demonstrated by our results. There are just so many, regardless of what the guidance is, there's just so many fundamentally good things about the market now.
I think we appreciate that. At the same time, you know, profit growth in the U.S. business has been outstanding. There's been, you know, maybe a little bit slower growth on the revenue line. Kind of an interesting contrast. As we look at the revenue performance in the year, how do we sort of square the performance of revenue versus the really strong profit trends?
Yeah. That's a really interesting question. For a finance person, it's kind of fun. It's really a matter of mix, and that one's pretty easy to explain. I'll use a few examples. GLP-1s last year, when availability became more available, the growth rates were really high. They've slowed down. They're still growing, but the growth rate slowed down this year. That is, as we've always said, a minimally profitable product for us. We aren't having the same growth rate, but profit's about the same. That is one of the things. Probably another big thing is, in specialty brands, the Part D specialty brands that go through mail order, some of those have been replaced with biosimilars. Specialty brands through mail order are a lot different than through physician practices because in mail order, we're sending a small number of pallets to a small number of locations.
The margins are very low. When the brand goes down to a biosimilar in Part D, the revenue comes down. In that low margin business, the profit stays about the same.
Okay.
A third example would be, we had a grocery customer that was more of a transactional customer than a partner customer. It was a very, very low profitability customer. We offloaded that grocery customer and picked up a more strategic grocery customer. When we offloaded that grocery customer, revenues came down, but profit stayed about the same. Those would be three things that are mixed things. This might be a little bit longer answer than you wanted. A fourth thing is with RCA . RCA is a much higher margin business. It's a much higher margin rather than a revenue business. Also, our distributor sells pharmaceuticals to RCA , who sells the pharmaceuticals. We don't double count that sale.
Right.
As a result of that, that makes it an even higher margin from a consolidated standpoint. Those are reasons why you'll be seeing our margin, our operating income growing faster than our revenue.
No, that's very helpful. Over the past couple of weeks in particular, there's been a lot of focus on vaccines in the headlines, both COVID and I guess also more broadly. Obviously, we're at the end of your fiscal year, and you don't have guidance for your next fiscal year yet. Maybe you could just spend a minute talking about how the company is thinking about planning for COVID vaccine demand over the next couple of years and maybe just the importance of vaccine sensitivity to your model more broadly.
Yeah. I think, you know, vaccines for us have become more important just because a lot of the COVID vaccine has gone through the retail channel. Historically, the normal cadence annual vaccines were actually not a really big piece of our business. They still really aren't because many of them are still being administered in a pediatric office or in a physician office, that primary care physician office that we don't really play in that space. If you think about the COVID vaccine, a good amount of that is going through the retail channel. How that typically works is we, every season, go to our customers, and we accumulate orders from them to have an understanding of what is their initial booking expectations so that when each drug, when the vaccine gets approved, then we know how we're going to ship those out.
Your variability is on the approval, but you have less variability on the initial bookings.
Okay.
Where you have the variability beyond that is, okay, what's the demand by the end customer? How does it come through? That'll determine what comes in our Q1 or Q2. Q4 is the typical seasonal, like, vaccine, you know, COVID vaccine time period. The one thing I would point out is last year was somewhat of a clean year in that there wasn't the subsidization of COVID vaccines in prior years. In prior years, it had been subsidized by the government. In the most recent year, it was a true commercial product.
Yeah.
The demand was presumably, you know, real. There's a lot of noise and discussion around vaccines. At the end of the day, we have to see, we know what our customers initially expect in that August, September time frame. The variability beyond that is what, how much of that goes, and then how much results in more and more orders. The thing I would say is we have been pretty consistent on disclosing what the contribution is from COVID vaccines, particularly when it was a large contribution in the 2024 time frame. It's still a meaningful contribution in 2025, but certainly much lower than what it was in 2024.
Okay, that is helpful. As we just think about the overall utilization environments, it's been quite strong. As we look out to 2026, there are some potential changes to the insured population that may be coming in the exchange market potentially, depending on outcome with enhanced subsidies there and also things maybe like work requirements and eligibility verification in Medicaid. I guess just big picture, how is the company thinking about those dynamics for the next couple of years?
Yeah. I think, you know, historically, it's always been a little bit of a challenge to predict what the fringe impacts are of coverage change, particularly for those parts of the market. I mean, if you go back historically when the Affordable Care Act launched and it added, you know, covered lives, it was hard to really digest or pinpoint what the exact incremental change is. As I think about the typical heavy, you know, type, common user heavy utilizers of pharmaceuticals, it tends to be more in that older population.
Yeah.
As opposed, you know, in that Medicare-t ype space where you have comorbidities. In the other parts of the ecosystem, it's typically, you know, maybe like a one-off, consistent, chronic medication, but usually not heavy users of pharmaceuticals. Setting that aside, I think, you know, certainly, as Jim said, Cencora's purpose is united in responsibility to create healthier futures. We're very much in favor of physicians or patients getting access to the pharmaceuticals that they're prescribed, and certainly, that access is generally key, particularly when you think about, you know, for the overall U.S. healthcare system, pharmaceuticals are the most effective form of care. The people getting access to their pharmaceuticals ends up saving the system a lot of money.
Okay, and then, you know, we touched a little bit on biosimilars, and, you know, the impact they're having on your P&L. You guys have a great biosimilar report out there, and it's just pretty clear to us that the pipeline is getting larger and more near term as we look out over the next few years. I guess, can you contrast, you know, maybe how the contribution from biosimilars is today relative to what it might be two, three, four years from now? How do we think about the evolution of the pipeline during that time frame?
Yeah, you go ahead.
No, please, please.
Biosimilars, particularly Part B, have been in our numbers and have been a very good contributor. They're somewhat creative in that we can get better margins on those, but they're great in that they take a lot of cost out of the system to make room for new innovations. Most recently, with the retina biosimilar that was launched, that's certainly a good guide. We've had a number of oncology biosimilars that have been in the mix, and they're good for profitability too as we look out. That Part B space is really the sweet spot. The Part D ones are good for the healthcare system and for the customers where we retain the biosimilar volume when they switch on the Part D side.
The way that's mail order and some other customer channels where some of those Part D drugs go, those are good for us as well, but not as much of a sweet spot as the Part B side where we generally retain the volume.
Okay.
There's only one thing I'll add that might be an interesting story. One of the real differentiating things about our RCA business is that we're the leader in clinical trial sites, and that we have so many sites. We have the leading doctors, and we have the capability. We do a lot of the retina trials there.
Okay.
We have exposure to biosimilars through those retina trials also, which is a very good part of the business on many fronts. It's a very good business. It creates a lot of data, and it really also attracts the young fellows out of school, the young doctors out of school, and makes it a more interesting place to work because not only are they operating on people, but they're doing the clinical trials also. It's something which I think is kind of a key part of our talent strategy there.
Okay. Interesting. You mentioned, you know, GLP-1s, obviously, and there's been variability on the, you know, the top- line contribution, but, again, not very profitable, it doesn't seem to you, given the incremental cold- chain cost. I guess as we think about, you know, the next few years and maybe, you know, oral drugs coming into this market with, you know, a lower cost structure, maybe improved profitability too, how do you think about the GLP-1 business maybe evolving over the next few years?
Sure. I'd say a couple of things there. First, if we are doing our business planning over the next couple of years, we are not envisioning a change. We are envisioning that the revenues continue to grow. They'll continue to be profitable for us, but they will be minimally profitable for us. When cold- chain is no longer required, they will be a little bit more profitable for us. You know, it's not a huge amount, but they will be more profitable for us without cold chain. What it's probably, and this is my own personal opinion, what it's really going to take for them to become significantly more profitable for us is a point in time when there's competition on the market, and then perhaps it would move to a more normalized fee for service.
Okay, that's helpful. If we were to think about RCA , maybe you could spend a minute just updating us on the integration process and how we should think about the growth profile of this business, maybe one or two years out from finishing the integration process.
Yeah. I will start, and Bennett, don't hesitate to jump in here. The integration process is going really well. The teams are working together very well. We recently had all their doctors and business leaders into our headquarters. We have a very large headquarter space for conferences and had just excellent meetings and interactions. It's an area where we definitely talk about prioritizing where we want to invest capital and prioritize where in our portfolio we want to invest. This is definitely an area we want to continue to invest. We really see the synergy here, and so I would say that the acquisition is going along very well.
Okay, and then maybe in a similar vein, to touch on OneOncology, we'd love to just get an update on the performance of the business. I think when you announced the deal, you might have had, I think, 900 oncology providers. When we were preparing for the conference, we were on the website, and it seems like you potentially have maybe almost doubled the number of oncology providers, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I guess first, what's driving the growth in providers? How should we be thinking about eventually the conversion to full ownership or majority ownership and what that's going to mean for your P&L?
Sure. It's both organic growth and inorganic growth that's been increasing the number of providers. We own 35% of the business today. We have a put-call structure to acquire the balance of the business from our partners. That starts three years after that initial deal and ends five years after the initial deal. Three years after the initial deal would be June of 2026. Five years after the initial deal is June of 2028. If you were modeling it, you could pick the midpoint. Kind of the midpoint, June of 2027, is when our partners' put ends and our call starts.
Mhmm.
It may happen sooner. We're just very pleased with the business. We're very pleased with the leadership, and we are just really looking forward to one day owning all of the business because we really think, given our pharmaceutical-centric strategy and our strength in specialty and the strength of these businesses, it really is the right move.
Okay. Obviously, the business is, you know, seemingly grown a lot, which is very exciting. I guess, how do we think about, you know, maybe the capital commitment that would be required to move into the majority ownership position?
It all depends on what the size is of the business. There are metrics in place, so it'll really depend upon the size of the business. One thing I can assure you is we have that capital, and it's arranged because we don't know exactly what the size is going to be at that date. We have that capital fully allocated and built into our plan, and it's something we definitely intend to do.
Okay. That's great. Now, just to expand more broadly to the MSO trend that we've seen over the past few years, we've now seen a number of platform transactions, both for you and across the rest of the industry as well. What do you think the next few years look like? Are there still large deals to do in markets that you find attractive, or do you think it's more about consolidation at this point in time?
Yeah. I'll answer that from Cencora's perspective. As we've said many times, Cencora is pharmaceutical-centric. When we look at MSOs, just like we look at other businesses, we're interested in the MSOs that are pharmaceutical-centric, that have the highest percentage of pharmaceuticals as revenues and integrated into the business. When we did the strategic analysis, we put oncology and retina at the top of that list, which are very pharmaceutical-centric. What I would see from us is continued bolt-ons or acquisitions or organic growth and hiring in those two areas which are pharmaceutical-centric.
Okay.
I would expect it to be a growth area for us.
Okay. Just another policy question. Obviously, it's very hard to predict the potential impact of things like most favored nation policies. I guess, is there a way to think about what you would need to know to frame the exposure there or think about what that could mean for your business if that were to come to pass?
Yeah. I think it's important to take a step back and, like, kind of look at what is trying to be.
Yeah.
Addressed or discussed, or approach the approach here. I think, clearly, there's a perception and a focus of a relative price differential that's not appreciated, that is trying to be, like, look at where prices that are being paid in other developed world countries. I think that's the focus, kind of period.
I think what we're focused on is if, to the extent that there are any potential changes locally in the U.S. that have knock-on effects, it's just that there isn't an unintended consequence of that relative pricing.
Mhmm.
We have very good relationships in terms of understanding what the focus is. Clearly, the focus is relative pricing, and there doesn't seem to be any appetite for impacting local community practice providers. I think that's the key, making sure that there isn't any unintended consequence. That's part of the value that we have, making sure that we are playing that advocator role for community providers in the U.S. I think it's something we've done for well over 15 years, and it's a discussion that is well- received.
Okay. Maybe just to spend a minute on the international business. Results have been a little bit more challenging there, maybe haven't improved as quickly as you might have hoped earlier in the year. I guess what's taken longer to improve internationally? As you look out at leading indicators, what gives you confidence in the trajectory of that business picking up a little bit over the next few quarters?
Yeah. That's an excellent question. Thank you for asking that. I'll just step back for a second and say, of course, our U.S. segment, which is 85% of our operating income, has been performing outstanding in the recent past.
Mhmm.
Our international segment, which is 15% of our operating income, we have not been pleased with the performance. The two biggest drivers this year have been our global specialty logistics business that many of you may remember as the World Courier business and then our global consulting business. Both businesses have had down years. World Courier has had a down year after many years of very good growth. As you all know, there's been slowness in the clinical trial market, and some slowness for kind of early-stage consulting work. That impacted both those businesses, our global specialty logistics business and our global consulting business, which is really the drivers of what's caused the weak results in the international segment. Alliance Healthcare has been doing okay, but it hasn't been having enough beats to offset the other two.
As we look forward to fiscal year 2026, we have better expectations for the international business in fiscal year 2026 because, as you've seen in the market, some clinical trial activity is rebounding. Combine that with some cost measures that we've taken in the business.
Mhmm.
Combine that with just the comps are easier. You know, now that we had a bad year, the comps are easier. We are internally planning on achieving growth in international this upcoming year.
Maybe since we have Bennett here, the productivity head, maybe spend a minute talking about what are your key areas of focus and how that translates into the results that you guys are putting out?
Yeah, I think, certainly, Cencora is a very efficient company, right?
Mhmm.
If you look at our margin profile, we have to be. As you think about our relationships upstream and downstream, we are expected to be. It's a key element of our value proposition as an organization. Having said that, as within any organization, there are opportunities to identify ongoing process and capability improvements. Whether it's better leveraging technology, connecting teams that might be in different areas or different jurisdictions to align work and align tasks more effectively. Lastly, I would say that we've done a good job in the last couple of years of building up a global capability center footprint.
Mhmm.
That allows us to access talent in various jurisdictions and make sure that we're really being thoughtful and strategic about how we do work, where we do work, and what type of work we ask people to do to ensure that they can really deliver on the value that they need to drive for Cencora.
Okay. Maybe just the last question on capital deployment. I guess we know that you need to plan for the eventual buy-in of OneOncology. Kind of thinking about that, what are the key priorities beyond that? Do you think there'll be much incremental deployable capital beyond what you'll be able to need to commit? What would the priorities be?
Yeah. Fortunately, we are a business that has terrific free cash flow.
Mhmm.
There are really four components to our balanced capital deployment. One is invest in the business. This year, we're investing about $600 million in CapEx, most of it which is in technology and infrastructure. Then strategic M&A, and really, a lot of that is spoken for with regard to both OneOncology and then bolt-ons both in OneOncology and RCA . It's not to say that there couldn't be some other things also, but that speaks for the majority of it.
We opportunistically repurchase shares. Of course, we've done that for many years, and we're very successful in buying down WBA shares, and they're essentially down to zero shares now. We'll opportunistically repurchase shares, and then we'll have a reasonable growing dividend, which this most recent year we grew at 8% to make sure that it was at least at the bottom end of our long-term EPS growth range.
All right. I think that's a perfect place to leave it. Thanks so much for the time this morning.
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. Appreciate it.