Are we ready? Okay, great. Good afternoon. My name is Lisa Gill, I'm the healthcare services analyst for J.P. Morgan. It is with great pleasure this afternoon that we have AmerisourceBergen. Presenting for AmerisourceBergen is CEO Steve Collis as well as CFO Jim Cleary. After their quick presentation, we're gonna have a little fireside chat here over at the table. Let me hand it off to Steve.
Hi, everybody. We appreciate you delaying your participation in the college football finals. Being back here with us for the first time in three years. It's a pleasure to talk about AmerisourceBergen. We've had a very productive three years. It's not like maybe we haven't been as active in investor conferences, but we've been very active in our business. Just wanna tell you a bit about the company. Of course, here we have the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements. I presume you've all memorized that. I've just got three slides. They're gonna be very brief here. I'm just gonna talk a bit about the company, and then we'll do the fireside chat. AmerisourceBergen really takes our position in the channel very seriously. We are on pharmaceutical-centered healthcare.
We regard pharmaceuticals as the most efficient form of healthcare, and we take our privileged position with our distribution framework and use a whole array of complementary solutions, both up and down the channel. Down the channel providers, we work a lot with community providers, including veterinarians, community oncologists and pharmacists. Smaller hospitals as well is also an important area for us. Some of the areas of expertise that we offer to providers are GPO services, financial analytics, helping with value-based care transitions, regulatory and legislative support. A lot of those smaller customers do look to companies like AmerisourceBergen to support them with initiatives. One of the things we're involved in, for example, is to help community pharmacists continue to be reimbursed for vaccinations and allow that site setting.
That's a very important driver and a very important way for pharmacists to practice at the high end of their scale. Clinical trial support, both on the provider and manufacturer side, is a really important theme for us. We're not a CRO, but we do a lot of things around clinical trials, including our very successful logistics, clinical trial logistics business, World Courier. Cencora has a lot of very strong portfolio companies that make up the essence of who we are. We try under the leadership of our Chief Operating Officer, Bob Mauch, we try really work them very integrated in a very integrated offering. One of the goals we'd have is why get into all these services?
We wanna be a comprehensive set of commercialization solutions to manufacturers with our provider footpath to really help commercialize products and maximize their potential in the market. Areas that we're into are scientific and development consulting, health economics, clinical trial support we've talked about, pharmacovigilance, data and analytics. We've really enhanced that most recently just this month with our acquisition of PharmaLex. PharmaLex is very well known and regarded in these areas. Safety, quality, validation and compliance, patient access, affordability, and inheritance services. Of course, I see my colleague, Peyton Howell, who really started AmerisourceBergen in those areas. We also have been a strong leader in specialty. We're well-known for our specialty presence.
We've been in those businesses since the mid-nineties, and we've retained very high market share in specialty physician services, including GPOs, but also in distribution. That's a very strong area of focus for us. How do we continue? What's our long-term strategy to create differentiated value for our shareholders? That's what this slide is about. We invest strongly in our people and our culture. More and more, we are a leader in ESG in our industry. There's tremendous commitment from the management team and indeed from our board in these areas. We are a purpose-driven company being united in our responsibility to create healthier futures. AmerisourceBergen, I'd say, is really broad in our ambition for pharmaceutical-based care to be the leader and to work those up and downstream channel solutions.
Uh, especially medical, medicine and services is absolutely essential for us to continue our leadership. Um, we're in a privileged position where we get to be, uh, learn so much from our oncology presence and, uh, and relay that over to other areas. Um, it's given us a strong foothold in specialty services in hospitals. And also because of the data and reporting and interoperability requirements that we needed to be a strong specialty provider, it's made us very strong with the COVID therapies, and it's a source of tremendous pride that all the, all the, the COVID therapies, AmerisourceBergen was a distributor of record for those. Uh, we continue to do that today with products like Paxlovid. Uh, AmerisourceBergen is the sole distributor, uh, working with the CDC and working with the different states and provider organizations to get those products into the market.
We like to think of ourselves as a strong partner to our leading customer portfolio. Our customers are outstanding leaders in their segments, whether it's Express Scripts or Kaiser or OneOncology or Florida Cancer Centers or so many of the MWR. Mars is a key customer for us in animal health. In every segment that we're in, we look for a leading customer to highlight our capabilities. In Europe, we have Boots would be our key retail pharmacy customer. We are focused on investing in innovation to further drive differentiation. We take our core distribution business, and a lot of that is dominated by very strong customers like Walgreens, higher scale customers, but often lower margin.
We wanna complement that with higher margin, higher growth activities like the commercialization services, really based on the strong infrastructure and market access that we have. We have very interactive discussions with our customers so that we can understand what their requirements are and how we can better meet their need. We wanna be part of the solution, we wanna contribute to Rx outcomes. Cencora will continue on both through organic and inorganic acquisitions to further our presence, to increase our capabilities, and to really help with that differentiation. You'll continue to see us investing in our innovation, bridge our strategic imperatives, and further advance our core business through both inorganic and organic investments. Jim will talk more about this.
We do have a very strong capital differentiation policy, and Jim will talk more about that. If you think about AmerisourceBergen, as I wrap up my prepared remarks, really think about us as a global healthcare leader. We are more and more of a global company. We have about half of our 44,000 people in the U.S. and half outside. We have a business like World Courier that operates in literally 70 different countries. We wanna create unparalleled access, efficiency and reliability. Access is such a key word to us, reliability. Our customers, in most cases, are ordering today for what they need tomorrow, for what they're gonna dispense or infuse the very next day. Business continuity is absolutely important to us. Areas like cybersecurity, you see us continue to make extensive investments in those areas. We have a foundation of leadership.
We've led our industry in many areas, including the transition to specialty services, and also more value-based contracting with our providers, where we have a emphasis on making all the different segments of our customers' portfolios profitable. That was a very important change that we led in our industry. You should think about us as being differentiated by unique and very experienced high value-added services. We would think that in future, if there was a difficult predicament like the COVID experience that we've had over the last few years, that we could be a unique first world solution to the manufacturers that would be launching those vaccines or those life-saving products. That's our goal. We wanna have a unique platform of distribution and complementary services in all key markets which we are participating in.
As a public company, we are committed to sustainable long-term growth. The resilience of our industry has been pretty remarkable. The first year that I was responsible for our core drug business was 2009, and with everything that was going on in the world, we had $4 million in bad debt, you know, for a company that at that time was doing about $45 billion in sales. We do about almost $1 billion in sales in every working day of the year, so it's quite remarkable. We are a Fortune 10 company, you'll see us continue to drive long-term growth by being focused on our purpose, by being focused on the culture that we represent, and by adding value to the stakeholders that we serve.
With that, I'm gonna hand over to Jim for some more information. We'll do Q&A. Thank you for your time.
Thank you very much, Steve. I'm Jim Cleary. I'm CFO of AmerisourceBergen. This slide shows our longer-term historical growth, and we're very focused on delivering sustainable growth. You'll see here over this period of time, 2016 to 2022, we had an adjusted EPS compound annual growth rate of 11%, and that's prior to the benefit from COVID therapy distribution. It's a little bit higher than that if we include the benefit from COVID therapy distribution. I know a lot of you probably listened in on our investor day that we did in the middle of calendar year 2022, and we introduced long-term guidance during that investor day.
That long-term guidance for adjusted EPS at the midpoint of our guidance range is 10%, also double-digit long-term guidance as we look forward for adjusted EPS. This slide shows our value creation drivers, you'll see that this really reinforces the points that Steve was just making. We have a foundation in pharmaceutical distribution where we have leading customers across pharmaceutical distribution, it's complemented by our higher-margin, higher-growth businesses. Really kind of great example of that is our leadership in specialty distribution. These are businesses that Steve founded many years ago that have been key drivers of our growth. Our biopharma manufacturer services businesses. You know, these higher-margin, higher-growth businesses will be drivers of our growth.
You know, clearly, we have a focus on margins and growing operating income. Importantly, we also have a focus on return on invested capital, and the distribution business is a very good return on invested capital business, and we've been averaging over a longer period of time a 18% return on invested capital. The company has a strong balance sheet, very strong
Free cash flow, which enables capital deployment. One of the things that we committed to do when we did the Alliance acquisition a little over 18 months ago is to pay off two-thirds of the Alliance debt within 2 years of the acquisition, and we'll fully meet or beat that goal, and we'll make the final payment to pay down two-thirds of the debt in March of 2023. Our capital deployment above and beyond that has been consistent. We make internal investments. We do about $500 million a year of capital investments, investing in the business, which historically has had quite good returns. We do strategic M&A, and the PharmaLex acquisition, a higher margin, higher growth business is consistent with this M&A plan to add value to our business and for our shareholders.
We do opportunistic share repurchases. This has been evidenced in the last year. Actually, since May, we've done about $1.2 billion of share repurchases and $700 million of repurchases in the most recent quarter. We'll maintain a reasonable growing dividend on our stock, which has been growing at about 5% a year. One of the other things that's embedded in our business is ESG. In the coming weeks, we'll be publishing our seventh sustainability report that I encourage you to read. We actually now have three ESG metrics that are included in our executive compensation. With that, we'll turn it over to Lisa for the questions.
Is the mic on? Okay, great. Thanks very much, and thanks for those comments. you know, as we think about this conference, and Steve, you've been coming for a really long time.
Don't remind me.
Me as well, me as well. You know, as we think about the conference, it's focused on innovation in both products as well as services. If I think about the future of Cencora, let's talk about how you think your role will continue to evolve. I mean, you've made a number of acquisitions. What are the areas that you're most excited about?
You know, we have this great base of, you know, with strong cash flow of distribution businesses. It's really, what do we do? How do we add about that? To have the experience and the operational chops to really implement what your strategies are. We also have a lot of new tools. I'm very proud of how the company has developed from a people perspective. When I became CEO, I talked about the company becoming intellectually confident. Truly, we have seen that vision materialize with the tremendous amount of people that are coming into the company are of such a high caliber and such a high, contributory nature and looking to add so much value. We have here Leslie Donato, who's our head of strategy.
The team that works under her, works in every one of our business segments and is really focused on those higher margin, higher growth businesses. Areas like cell and gene therapy are the next extension of our specialty business. A little bit when we first heard about cell and gene therapy, for example, you know, when the products first came out, in fact, it was PROVENGE. I got really concerned about what was our role gonna be because it was going straight from the laboratory to the provider and often to a academic medical center type, so where we didn't have as much role. We've developed our health systems business tremendously. We've developed our capabilities. We did the World Courier acquisition, for example. We're looking at cryogenic storage. We're looking at liquid nitrogen containers.
We're actually in our third or fourth generation of those containers. We're able to ship these therapies almost anywhere in the world. That's a very good example. You know, another example I can tell you is the contracting we do with ION, how much more analytical it's become.
Mm.
How much more focused on value-based care it's become, really adding value for those products, adding value for the patients. AmerisourceBergen continues to develop in those areas. With the smaller customers, we have opportunities to help them aggregate, to help them act more like their larger competitors. With large customers and large players, some of the larger pharma companies, we do have because of the interoperability, because of the data and reporting we have and the tremendous market share that we have in key segments, we're able to add a lot of value to them as well and help them with a lot of market access, a lot of market awareness.
I think that this capability of Cencora, as we look at the company under Bob's leadership, will continue to only grow as we look at best practices, as we look at more classes of trade in Europe. One of the areas where we think there is an opportunity in the long run is to develop into more classes of trade in Europe for Cencora. These are all things that really you can see get our juices flowing.
Mm-hmm.
I'm confident that we are gonna continue to have a strong presence in all these key markets that we've selected.
I think Jim highlighted you spend about a half a billion dollars a year in making investments in your business.
Yes.
Would the things that you're talking about fall within that, or do you need to make incremental acquisitions or other incremental investments?
Some of that $500 million is to grow the business and some is to keep the lights going. We have to have very important investments. You'll see a lot of that $500 million go towards Europe, where we feel we have a little bit of a technology catch-up to make. We wanna... There's, you know, we have a couple of different distribution centers in Istanbul. Doesn't make sense for us to consolidate and have a more modern, automated approach. Those are the sort of things we're looking at. We have a very well set systems and infrastructure in the U.S. There's not a lot of acquisitions that we feel we have to make. Some of our companies are very acquisitive-oriented, particularly PharmaLex has had a history.
Right.
They've done a lot of acquisitions. We don't wanna stop them. We wanna keep on them being progressive and innovative. We have a very balanced capital deployment strategy. Of course, you know, just to be honest, we also have to contemplate that there could be future stock sales by Walgreens, and we have all of that we keep into mind. We're lucky because we have a brilliant CFO who can manage all these things.
You laid out detailed guidance in November for fiscal 2023. Reflecting back on that commentary, as we think about, you know, some of the headwinds and tailwinds, anything that you'd call out today that is nuanced in any way versus what we heard in November?
Yeah. I don't have anything major to call out today. We'll be fully updating guidance when we announce our 1st quarter fiscal results on Wednesday, February 1st. I will say, you know, we feel, you know, very good, as Steve talked about in his opening remarks, about the resilience of our business. We feel very good about utilization trends, our leadership and specialty.
Mm-hmm.
The capital deployment that we've done year to date. We have talked about, you know, one of the things that's more difficult to predict in our business is COVID therapies.
Mm-hmm.
If I go back to fiscal year 2021, ancient history-
Mm-hmm.
We had contribution of about $0.30, and then in 2022, we had contribution of about $0.72.
Right.
Our guidance for this year is $0.30-$0.35. In that's a harder number to predict. Every quarter we'll be very transparent, just say what we made from COVID therapies in the current quarter versus the same quarter in the prior year. As I said, we feel, you know, overall, very good about the resilience and of our business and utilization trends.
Just on utilization trends, just to remind people, you know, we've talked a lot about flu and flu trends. If I remember correctly, for the drug distribution model, when we saw Tamiflu come, become generic, that was a great flu, type of event. Generally speaking, flu is just kind of, it's okay for you, right? Any incremental script is good, but it's not like it's a big tailwind. Is that the right way to think about it?
It's not a big tailwind. Look, you know, a busy flu season like this year helps, get more patients into the stores.
Yeah.
There, there's a tailwind from that. But they're not very expensive products and, not that big of... Bear in mind that we have a very wide, you know, range of guidance, so we can work-
Right.
Within that range quite well. It's not that important.
You know, over the years, Steve, you and I have talked about your ability to support specialty drugs through development, commercialization, life, you know, the whole life cycle. When I think about the acquisition of PharmaLex, right?
Yeah.
When we look at the coming years, and we think about your positioning around this, can you maybe just talk to us a little bit more about how PharmaLex fits in and, you know, what you see around this opportunity? Again, going from commercialization, you know, early product development all the way through commercialization and how you help your customers around this.
Well, you know, first of all, the private equity market has been kind of difficult for us to participate in a lot of the commercialization type services market. We felt like this was within a range where it was affordable. Our finance committee of our board is very focused on returns. It's not just strategy.
Mm-hmm.
We have to get good financial returns for our shareholders. You know, companies with strong balance sheets and cash flows like ours, we think are coming into a really strong position over the coming years as we head into a much more recessionary times. I heard your chairman debating whether there is gonna be a recession or not, but let's just assume there's gonna be a recession. It's hard to imagine there's not gonna be one in Europe. We're very well-positioned. You know, in the nineties, so really, you know, started this, we started the specialty group in 1993, 1994. Then in 1996, we bought two distribution businesses in 1996 and 1998. Then we added in the Lash Group, and we added in Xcenda.
Mm-hmm.
We added in all these different commercialization services businesses. With Alliance, we have a very good footprint of business, which has got a good mixture of high margin, high growth businesses. We're taking that capability, and you add like something like a PharmaLex, where we have strong talent coming in. We're really focused on what else can we do with the manufacturers. We want manufacturers to think of AmerisourceBergen as their first solution when they commercialize products. It's an outstanding acquisition if you look at it in terms of the quality reporting, the product lifecycle management, helping with submissions.
Mm-hmm.
Helping with statistics, data analysis. All of these areas that they're doing in some countries that they're in. 30% of the business is in the U.S. We believe we can help them there. It's gonna strengthen our overall relationships with pharma. Often the pharma relationships are what leads to downstream relationships and leads to strength. In some cases, we think we can help the actual health systems and the governments of the countries. There's some rules that we're seeing, for example, in France, that just make no sense. We wanna try help. We're gonna participate in all the forums, the trade associations, et cetera. trongly believes in participating in the industries that we have key presences in. I'm excited about that.
I think the knowledge we have, especially in the US, is very replicable.
Yeah.
I was talking to a manufacturer that's interested in a new, a new therapeutic area and was looking at what we can do for them in the physician space. I said, "We're not in that space now, but we haven't had the right drugs. If they have the right drugs, we can build it for you.
Mm-hmm.
If they have the right drugs and if there's complementary services around that, AmerisourceBergen can add to that. Jim, you wanted to add something?
I think that covers it, Steve.
Okay. I thought you were telling me I need to move on.
Okay.
On to-
When we think about, you know, you touched a lot on Europe here, but there is that concern, as you talked about from a macroeconomic perspective. I guess really just two questions? You talked a little bit about what you know in the U.S. and what you can bring to Europe, but we have seen others try to make changes in Europe, and it's more difficult than they had anticipated. Just 18 months into owning Alliance, you know, are you finding that it's difficult to make these changes or do you feel like that it's more open, maybe some others have kind of pushed things forward? I'm just curious as to how you're thinking about those opportunities.
I'm really happy to have that question. First of all, we have to say that, you know, AmerisourceBergen's balance sheet was in such a strong shape at that time. We're able to really pay half cash and half borrow at very competitive rates, and we have that locked in. Actually, by the end of this fiscal year, we'll almost have the debt completely paid off. Right, Jim?
Yeah.
I think March next year, we completely have the debt paid off. That gives us a $6.5 billion acquisition with, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in free cash flow and earnings that we've paid off essentially within three years. That put us in a very strong position. I have to start off with that. We inherited a business that's operating very well, that's got a key presence, is number one or one, two or three in all the markets that they operate in. We're learning all about the different systems. For example, in Norway, the Netherlands, we operate retail stores as well. Generally, we like to rather be in pure distribution.
Those countries and those markets are so small that it's just the way that wholesale and retail have worked together in those sort of environments. On a synergy perspective, we didn't overburden our model.
Mm-hmm.
Because it was so accretive, and we knew that those synergies, as we've said, we have to make a lot of investments in Alliance because you need strong systems, and you need integrated systems to be able to do these complex services. We're on our path to do that. We knew that it wouldn't be easy, and then we've had COVID and supply chain, and who would have ever imagined it would be hard to buy servers, things like that. You know, but we feel really blessed. Also, we've been able to do things like shared services centers and a lot of tax and financial structuring, which has given us tremendous benefits. Some markets have been stronger. Our Turkish business, for example, is a great business.
We're doing a bit better in Spain than we'd modeled and lots of places that we're proud about. We've inherited a strong team that is very P&L focused. You know, I think we're gonna be a strong player in Europe for decades to come.
As we think about your relationship with WBA, and we continue to see them exit portions of the ownership stake in AmerisourceBergen, and you've really been right beside them buying back stock, which I think that the market has appreciated. When we think about, you know, capital deployment, you talked about paying down the debt. We've talked about share repurchase. Outside of the WBA activity, how are you thinking about capital deployment today and priorities for this year?
It's, you know, if we exclude the WBA repurchases, it's really kind of, very consistent with what we've, the way we've viewed capital deployment for many years. It's always reinvesting in our business to strengthen our business. Strategic M&A and PharmaLex, which Steve talked about, you know, is a great example of that, which is, you know, highly aligned with our strategy of pharma manufacturer services and growing higher margin, higher growth businesses. You know, our reasonable growing dividend that we've been growing at about 5% a year.
Also we'll, you know, if WBA decides to sell additional shares, we'll continue to look at it as an opportunity to partner with them and potentially repurchase shares, just as we did in the most recent quarter, where we purchased about $700 million of shares from WBA.
It sounds like outside of the repurchases in general and WBA and paying the dividend as well, and paying down the debt, it doesn't sound like you're looking to do any other kind of M&A activity in the recent time?
You know, we don't feel like we have any compelling, you know, gaps. I think, we'll always be, you know, opportunistic. We're active in the market. Leslie's department's got a lot of young people that are very connected in the marketplace and are out there and talking to people. A lot of our business owners, we have Richard Tremonte here, who's really responsible for all our U.S. provider businesses. A lot of people like him are very interested in growing their business, not only organically, but inorganically. You know, we're gonna be active in the marketplace. I mean, we think we have the operational chops. We have a much stronger integration path. You know, remember the old acquisition model that Cisco had, where everything was, like, mechanized.
I don't think we're ever gonna be like that, but we have, you know, we have a strong perspective on how we integrate businesses and the culture that we expect and the way that we expect that our managers will behave. We also have a lot of people in the company that really understand our culture well, and we know that our culture works for our business. The culture of being very customer-centric, of being very close to your associates, being very involved in your business, all these are hallmarks of AmerisourceBergen and our purpose-driven culture.
Steve, you touched on this a little bit when I asked about flu specifically, and you made an interesting comment. You said, "Well, it brings more people into the store." What are your general views on utilization trends? I think the last time we talked, your view was that we're back to kind of pre-pandemic types of utilization trends. Are we seeing an uptick in general that the person comes into the store, they have flu, not a big thing for you, but maybe they're reminded that they should be taking their chronic medication?
You know, we're in so many different classes of trade. Sometimes, you know, one of our customers may be a little bit disadvantaged because they're having problems with staffing. Then we'll see that show up in another side of care being stronger, like, you know, mail order versus retail. That could be 1 example. We also have, you know, community sites versus health system sites, and we're represented really well in that. We're seeing, I'd say utilization trends. I mean, people understand, payers understand it's important to drive adherence. It's a key initiative for AmerisourceBergen. You know, where we do see slight anomalies, it usually corrects itself. We saw, you know, demand right now for antibiotics and other kids' in-infective type products really spike up.
You know, we know enough to tell customers not to overorder and be responsible. I think we managed through these things very well. Look, Lisa, you know, I've been here 30 years now almost, and I tell you, I always am amazed at the resilience of our business. I mean, we just don't have the demand problems that other businesses have, and, you know, I feel so blessed that we don't have to go through a layoff of thousands and thousands of people.
Right.
I've never had to go through that in my career, and that's an incredible blessing, and it's part of the resilience of the business that we have.
Well, I mean, pharmaceuticals are so important, right?
Yeah.
When you think about that.
So underappreciated. I mean, people think that 60%, 70% of healthcare costs, and it's.
Right
...really around 14%. Not growing as fast as some of the other pieces.
You know, just in that vein, usually this week we talk about branded drug pricing. I know it's not as big of an area-
Yeah
...for you anymore when we think about the profit model, but it's still a component, right?
Yeah.
As we sit here today, pricing has come in largely as expected. Would that be the right way to put it?
Sure. As you said, right now, well over 95% of our brand buy-side dollars are fee for service, it's well under 5% where we rely on price increase from the manufacturers. When we did our guidance this year, we assumed that manufacturer price increases would be in line where they've been the past couple of years. You know what I would say is, you know, that's kind of our guidance, and anything that happened would be within our range. I think that, you know, the numbers that we've all seen published are pretty good.
Then on the generic side, it's really all about the spread, right? You've got a great buying group. I think when we were together in November, we talked that we're kind of surprised we've never seen any type of inflation in generics, just given the number of generic manufacturers. You know what it costs them to manufacture a product, you know, whether it's staffing costs, et cetera. Do you think that there's potential for us to see any kind of price inflation on generics in 2023?
You know, I made the comment that, you know, when this generic deflation started, I mean, when we got to our next three-year plan, we started saying, "Okay, every year it's gonna, it's gonna mitigate, it's gonna go down." I've been surprised at how stubbornly persistent deflation is. Anything that changed, I mean, we've learned to manage it within our guidance. As I said, we adopted, in my prepared remarks, we adopted this, balanced portfolio approach to make sure that all our therapeutic segments were profitable. I'm so pleased that we did that. It was a great example of us being close to the market and planning for changes. I would never have imagined how persistent the generic deflation has been. Having said that, if it changes, it would be good for the manufacturers.
You know, we've had a couple of people tell us that they're expecting the next five years to be much more positive. We've had a couple of manufacturers say that they are gonna stop manufacturing molecules that aren't profitable for them. We'll see how it happens. I mean, it's important that we have access to secure, ongoing suppliers.
Right
...of high-quality medicines. We also think that the government should be being very thoughtful about what the next pandemic could be and what the secure supply chain should look like and where we source API from. We'd love to be a part of that solution.
Are you talking with the government about that?
We always do. I mean, we manage the strategic stockpile and because of what we did with COVID therapies. It's not just us, our industries-
Right, right.
HDA, which Rich is serving on now, is very, very important in that discussion as well.
you know, AmerisourceBergen is really well known for their specialty business. I know that's where you came from, especially in the oncology area.
Yeah
they've done a great job with community-based oncologists over the years. As we think about kind of the next iteration of pricing models, there's so much talk about value-based care and the shift towards value-based care.
Yeah.
How does AmerisourceBergen play a role in helping the community-based oncologists as we make that move towards value-based care?
You know, we have such connectivity to the market. You know, with ION, we first of all can help physicians keep up with some of these trends. If we ever needed to get to where we had to have, say, community oncologists doing value-based contracting, I think it would be a great model extension for us. Pretty much like we've helped with Elevate.
Yeah
...and the PSAO for retailers. We help with access, and we'd help. I mean, we have such connectivity to the practices for us to integrate into their EMRs and their patient records. I think we'd be well positioned to do that. I, you know, if we look towards the future, I think that AmerisourceBergen is gonna become more payer-oriented. It hasn't been a key stakeholder for us. Of course, we're never unmindful of payers.
Right.
and we have, you know, companies like Express Scripts, Cigna, that are big stakeholders, big customers for us. You could see where we could be more connected to managed care from a systems and a reporting and analytics point of view. I think that we will move to wherever the market needs us to be so that we can carry on being relevant, but that most importantly, our customers can carry on being relevant.
You know, with the launch of several biosimilars in the oncology space.
Yeah
...especially over the past few years, you have a really potential tailwind opportunity around this business, right? You are so well positioned. How do you continue to see strong uptake in biosimilars? Is it the education process? Is it having interchangeability from the FDA? What do you think will continue to drive biosimilars in especially in the area of specialty?
Well, you know, we're very interested to see how the ophthalmology market's gonna play out as we have some biosimilars.
Yeah.
AmerisourceBergen's a big player there. We're always about our customers and ultimately our patients having choice. We'll participate in all those. We see that, you know, there's a fair patent process. I mean, it is in place and, you know, as these products become available, it creates a headwind, and there's tremendous opportunities. You said that the theme for this conference is innovation, so we know that these product life cycles are gonna continue, and I think biosimilars really makes room for it. We were an early proponent of biosimilars. I mean, there was a editorial that I wrote a couple of two years ago about not throwing in the towel on biosimilars.
Yeah.
You know, it's turned out, it was a bit slower than we expected, but we knew that these products were gonna have tremendous acceptance. Oncologists have shown a real strong propensity to accept them and to prescribe them. Certainly, certainly interchangeability is only gonna help. It's certainly easier in oncology than it is in, say, rheumatoid arthritis or MS, where you have, you know-
Right.
The patient's stable, you'd wanna continue that. With the cycle-based nature of chemo, and on supportive care products in oncology, we are well positioned. I think you'll see that this will carry on being an important facet, but it's gotta be one product category. Again, our goal is to be successful and profitable in all product categories.
Great.
So...
How do we think just, you know, I know we only have a few minutes left, but how do we think about the profitability of biosimilars, Jim? You know, is it more profitable than a branded, maybe less than a generic? Like, how do we think about that?
Yeah. overall, we feel very good about the profit opportunities in biosimilars, particularly in the Part B area.
Yeah.
It's been, you know, a very nice tailwind for us in our specialty physician services business. In Part D, it would probably be a small incremental benefit for us, but not at the magnitude that it's been.
Right.
A benefit in Part D. That, you know, we'd say, in general, that the margin on biosimilars would be clearly higher than a brand, but less than a generic product in terms of percentage margin.
We only have about a minute left. What didn't I ask today, Steve, that we want to make sure that people understand about AmerisourceBergen as they think about investment in the company?
As I said, we're a purpose-driven company, but what I'd love the audience to know and our shareholders to know is that we really care about being successful in all aspects of our business. We wanna be a part of the solution. We wanna help our customers be successful. We wanna help our suppliers be successful. We focused on the growth of our associates. We focused on being an active citizen. I'm more involved in areas like Business Roundtable, where we're thinking about how do we promote business as a source of virtue for society, which I know is right in line with Jamie. It does make sense.
I think you're in an area where a AmerisourceBergen, a company like ours with 44 thousand associates and the amount of business that we do every day, we do have a chance to be part of the solution. We intend to exercise that privilege to the utmost of our ability.
Great. Well, with that, we're out of time. Thank you so much as always.
Thank you.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
Thank you.
Thank you.