Good morning. My name is Lisa Gill, and I head the Healthcare Services team here at JP Morgan. It is with great pleasure that I introduce McKesson. We welcome them back to San Francisco. I missed when you guys were here. Presenting for McKesson is CEO Brian Tyler, and Britt Vitalone, CFO, will join us for the Q&A. So with that, let me welcome Brian to the stage.
Thank you, Lisa.
Thank you, Lisa. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be back with you on behalf of the thousands of McKesson employees, our great management team, and our Board of Directors. I get the privilege to share a little bit of the McKesson story with you this morning. Before I begin, of course, I've got the cautionary statement and disclosures that I would point everybody to. More information can be found on the McKesson Investor website. I will make some comments regarding non-GAAP measures this morning. So please familiarize yourself with these statements. At McKesson, our mission, our purpose, is to advance health outcomes for all. It starts for us with our values. We call them ICARE. It's about integrity. It's about an inclusive environment, a sense of belonging. It's about customer focus. It's about accountability. It's about respect and about excellence.
This is how we deal with our customers, our patients, our partners, our investors, and most importantly, each member of Team McKesson. About five years ago, we rolled out our strategic focus and our growth pillars. The first and the foundational pillar of that is our relentless focus on our people and our culture. We really believe attracting the best talent and then creating an environment where that talent can work at the top of its ability enables productivity, efficiency, creativity, and better outcomes ultimately for our partners and patients. The second pillar is to strengthen our core distribution businesses. We're very well known for our medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical distribution businesses in North America. And these are foundational pillars that support our AOP growth and our cash flow generation. The next pillar of our strategy is really to be focused on modernizing and accelerating our portfolio.
This takes on a few different flavors or components. In the past few years, we've been busy divesting businesses that we didn't think aligned to our growth strategies. We've been busy acquiring businesses that we think complemented our growth strategies. And we've recently announced investments into the business that we think will accelerate the use and leverage the technology innovation that we see going on in markets around us. So this is about speed, agility, great focus on our two main growth pillars, our growth pillars being to enhance our oncology platforms and to expand and continue to expand and enhance our biopharma platforms. So you put this together, you think about the organic growth that's resident in the markets that we participate in. You think about this efficiency, modernization, the operating leverage that we're able to drive through our scaled businesses.
You think about our healthy balance sheet and our very purposeful capital allocation strategy. This enables us to deliver long-term EPS growth targets of 12%-14% for the company. Now, how we're organized? We're organized into four segments: our U.S. Pharmaceutical segment, our Prescription Technology Solutions segment, our Medical-Surgical segment, and our International segment, which is primarily Canada and Norway. You can see on the pie chart on the right the relative adjusted operating profit contributions of each. We're particularly proud that over 80% of this pie chart is growing in low double digits. I mentioned our two growth strategies, and that's really where I want to spend most of our time this morning is focused on them. The first was oncology. This is a simple representation of the relative drug spend in the various parts of the pharmaceutical marketplace.
You can see that oncology is roughly twice the next biggest therapeutic area, which is not a coincidence that we have chosen to focus a lot of our growth strategy on oncology. Now, this is not a new strategy for us. We've begun to recognize the potential in oncology all the way back in the mid-2000s. We started this journey with the acquisition of an oncology specialty distributor called OTN. We then layered on top of that GPO services, both for our soon-to-be owned network of clinics and for the unaffiliated clinics that we serve. In 2010, we took the leap to actually enter into the oncology community practice management business with the acquisition of The US Oncology Network.
And then we began our journey to surround that network with ancillary services that support both the provider, the oncologist in the practice of oncology, but also our biopharma manufacturer partners to benefit from the insights of practicing oncology into how to launch, commercialize, and penetrate their new innovative products. So we added a dedicated oncology specialty pharmacy called Biologics. We expanded into medical and radiation oncology with the acquisition of Vantage Oncology. Then we decided, based on the scale that we have achieved and the data that flowed through our network and these thousands of providers that are using our exclusive EMR called iKnowMed, that we would organically invest to develop a data and insights business that we called Ontada.
And then in 2020, you can see we expanded further in a joint venture with Sarah Cannon Research Institute and our own US Oncology Research organization to really expand into clinical trials, and then our most recent and exciting announcement has been Florida Cancer Specialists and our pending acquisition of Core Ventures. Now, this is still going through the regulatory review process, but we were super excited. If you think about geographically, this is a market that's likely to continue to expand and benefit from demographics. It was a hole in the map. But most importantly, we found a practice that thought about oncology, practicing oncology in the same way that we do, and we think leveraging the best of what we have and the best of what FCS has is going to make a big difference for the provision of cancer care in the community. Now, that's how we built the business, and that's the 15-year journey that we've been on in oncology.
If you think about how we're organized, if you start on the left with specialty distribution and our specialty pharmacy, this is really the anchor. And this benefits from the innovation that goes on in the drug pipeline. This gives great scale. And in totality, we think the oncology platform generates about $35 billion of revenue in our fiscal 2025. A lot of that is the specialty distribution, specialty pharmacy business. And we are a leader in this space. As you move one box to the right, practice management. This is The US Oncology Network. Today, over 2,700 providers strong. We added 185 providers so far just in this fiscal year. So we've had a great track record of growing this network over the past several years. And of course, when we get the opportunity to close the Florida Cancer deal, that will add to these numbers.
Practice management is the anchor of the flywheel. The more scale you add to the practice, the more distribution, the more specialty pharmacy flows through, the more GPO services flow through. Importantly, the more data you aggregate, the more insights you can create. That's the role of Ontada, is to take the 3+ million patient records that we have available every day and to glean insights out of those that are useful in two ways. One is useful for the provider to be more efficient and effective in the provision of cancer care, to get better patient outcomes. The other is to provide those insights in how these pharmaceutical innovations are working in the community practice of oncology today. Those are extremely important to our biopharma partners. The last tranche is our clinical trial management and services.
We are super excited about this. If you think about community-based oncology care, it's low cost. It's accessible, more accessible to patients. By expanding the network and then taking our joint venture, we're enabling cutting-edge oncology care to happen for people closer to where they live in a more accessible way. We've currently got 250 locations that are providing this access to clinical trials, and we're participating in over 1,000 clinical trials. Lastly, you'll see that on the bottom, as you move from the left to the right of this page, the margin profile of these businesses increases. We're very excited about our oncology platform. The second platform that I wanted to talk about, our second growth strategy, is our biopharma services solutions. Today, we're really anchored around access, affordability, and adherence.
So if you think about access, I mean, this is how do you help patients get started on that first script? How do you get them cleared through the hurdles that might be at the pharmacy counter or in the payer to do that swiftly and efficiently? 94 million times this past year, we helped with that transaction. We are right in the workflow of pharmacy. We're right in the workflow of providers. Affordability. We know that affordability can sometimes be a barrier for people staying on their medication therapy. We administer programs that help enable financial assistance that allow people to start and stay on therapy. Last year, our solutions facilitated almost $9 billion of financial support for patients. That, of course, leads to more scripts and better health outcomes. A nd lastly is adherence.
This is through things like hub services and patient contact programs that help coach people through their therapy, that help them understand that they may have symptoms or indications, but those are normal and they should stay on the therapy. So these are the real solutions that we are anchored at doing. Much like oncology, this has been a focus for McKesson for several, several years. We started with the acquisition of RelayHealth, which is connectivity to over 50,000 pharmacies doing about 23 billion transactions a year. This is right in the workflow of pharmacy. It's pop-up windows. It's messaging. It's insurance information, patient code, all the things that help that be a more efficient, effective process. Along that journey, we began to partner with a company called CoverMyMeds, which had a similar network but pointed towards providers.
We ultimately, in 2017, acquired CoverMyMeds, bringing 950,000 providers, a 950,000 provider-strong network to complement what we had in the pharmacy side. We had long been in hub services and 3PL, but the acquisition of RxCrossroads gave us greater scale and broadened our participation in more therapeutic areas. We've continued recently to invest in services that we think add to this network effect through the acquisition of Rx Savings Solutions, which really is a price transparency and benefit insights company with a network of thousands of patients. We think about a provider network, a patient network, and a pharmacy network. What's common about both of these strategies? One, we've been at it for a while. We've got a lot of experience. We know these markets. We know these businesses. We know these opportunities.
We think we have a terrific track record of growing off a core hub of services, expanding into natural adjacencies, improving the value proposition we have both to end providers, whether that's an oncologist or a pharmacist, and our biopharma partners. These are both large and growing markets. And we think there is significant unmet needs, significant opportunity to innovate, to take these tools, the networks, the connections we have, and continue to solve problems that allow healthcare to work more efficiently. These are scaled platforms. And in totality, while each one of the solutions I talked about may have a point competitor, in totality, as a portfolio view, we think these are really, truly differentiated and give us lots of room for innovation and strategically position us for continued success, much like the success we have realized in the last several years.
This is, in many ways to us, the proof point that the strategy is working. And it shows over the last five years, a 17% adjusted EPS compound annual growth rate, the bar on the far right representing our current guidance for fiscal 2025 of $32.40-$33. Complementing the strategy is a very disciplined capital allocation framework. Our first priority is to continue to invest back into the business. That investment could be through organic investments like our technology modernization effort, our launch of Ontada, or it could be acquisitions of either capability or businesses that we think complement these growth platforms that I have just outlined. We're committed to returning capital to our shareholders. Our dividend grows each year in line with our adjusted operating profit and our free cash flow growth.
And we are committed to returning capital to shareholders through share repurchases when we can't find strategic uses of that capital. We currently have an excess of $8.5 billion left on our remaining share authorization plan. And we are firmly committed to maintaining a strong balance sheet. We are committed to our investment-grade credit rating. We have great cash flow generation in the business, forecasting about $5 billion this year. So we have ample liquidity to execute our strategy, and that gives us terrific financial flexibility. So as I close and move into the Q&A, just a couple of high-level themes from the day. I mean, we are really well-known for our core distribution platforms in medical, surgical, and U.S. Pharma. But we are much more than that as a company.
Our growth platforms in oncology and bioservices truly give us a lot of differentiation and a lot of diversity in the healthcare solutions that we can deliver. We have a track record of executing on our strategy, and we think there is still a lot of runway left in the areas of oncology and biopharma services. And our businesses generate the kind of cash flow that's going to allow us to reinvest in the business to sustain that track record of growth. This is a statistic I don't think we talk about enough, but I didn't want to leave this morning's presentation without that. We're delivering shareholder value creation, and our return on invested capital is in excess of 26%. So we believe the investment theme for McKesson is quite compelling. Thank you for your time and your attention today, and we will shift to Q&A.
Great. Thanks so much, Brian, for all the comments. I want to start with maybe a more broad-based question as we think about 2025 and the guidance that you've given, which is very strong guidance for 2025. You've talked about the Optum Rx contract when you announced the Florida Cancer Specialists acquisition, and you continue investing in your business. As we think about the back half, most people probably know that March 31st is your end. So we're about to report the December quarter, and they have one quarter left to go. What are the continued areas of focus for you as we think about the back half of 2025 and then leading into 2026?
Great. Well, first off, we're very pleased with where we are at this point of the year, and we think our guidance is strong, and we have good confidence in that. It has been a very busy year. I mean, onboarding Optum is arguably one of the largest, most complicated customers we could do, and I think the team executed on that just flawlessly. That contract didn't start till July, so we were a bit into our fiscal year. And I'd say now the implementation is, for the most part, kind of fully up and running at steady state. We're very excited about the possibilities of joining with Florida Cancer. We're very optimistic that that deal will get through regulatory review, but we've got to go through the regulatory review. We just recently announced that we divested Rexall, so that's part of our ongoing, always ongoing portfolio evaluation.
While we're very committed to the Canadian business and we love our leading presence in distribution and banner pharmacy and our biopharma services business there, we think that. So look, we've done a lot of foundational things. Those are a lot of foundational things that support growth, not just through the back half of this year, but we think into the future as well. Anything you would add?
Yeah. I think just maybe more tactically, certainly Brian talked about a strategy-led business with a lot of execution momentum over the last several years. As we think about this year, we started the year with what we thought was pretty strong guidance. And after each of the first two quarters, we raised that guidance. And as we sit here today, we reaffirm the full-year guidance that we gave of adjusted EPS of $32.40-$33. And that represents growth over the prior year of 18%-20%. So we feel really good about the continued momentum across the business and across the portfolio of services and capabilities we have. And the building blocks to that, if you think about the operating performance in the business, the adjusted operating profit performance is growth year-over-year of 13%-15%.
We believe that each of our segments is growing well and performing against the strategies that we have. So we feel very confident about the remainder of the year. We certainly feel confident given the performance that we had. And we think that the back half of the year is going to be a strong back half of the year, as was indicated in our last guidance. The only other maybe modeling thing that I would just remind everybody from a tax rate perspective, we continue to believe that the full year is going to have an effective tax rate of 17%-19%. Although the third year, as we indicated, or third quarter, as we indicated previously, we'll have a higher rate somewhere in the 23%-26% range. Again, that's just timing between the quarters.
But on operating performance, really strong use of capital and capital deployment is leading to that adjusted EPS growth of 18%-20%.
We're seeing, if we look at IQVIA data, we're seeing overall really strong utilization trends across pharmaceuticals. From your perspective, two things. One, are there any pockets of growth that you would talk about? And then two, as we go into 2025, due to the changes under the Inflation Reduction Act, the out-of-pocket cost for the senior will go to $2,000, where today it's about $3,650, down from roughly $5,000. So it continues to move down for people in part. Do you anticipate that in calendar 2025, we can see an increase in utilization because of those changes?
The first thing I would say is that we have not built any projections for what this reform might mean into our FY 2025 guidance. So we have been pleased with the market evolution, and it's been in line with what we thought it would be at the beginning of the year when we set out the guidance. So we haven't really have a super refined projection of what this could mean. But of course, if your out-of-pocket cap comes down, you're more likely to start a therapy knowing that you can afford it. And once that cap goes away, you're more likely to persist on it. Now, how that will play out across the various therapeutic areas and disease states, and does that create a material uplift, is yet to be seen, but more volume is good.
Volume is always good, right? So when we think about oncology, and you spend a lot of time talking about biopharma services and your oncology business, it's always been a significant growth driver. I don't remember you breaking out the $35 billion previously?
We did it. O ur sell- side are updating the web.
Oh, I was there.
Yeah.
I was there. All right. I just forgot.
You should.
That's okay.
We did it specially for Lisa.
We did it specially for Lisa, yes.
But when we think about benefiting from adding providers to US Oncology Network, can we maybe just talk about traditional distribution versus GPO versus adding providers, MSO? I mean, today, McKesson's doing so much more when we think about all three of those buckets.
Yeah, and we talk about it as a platform for a while. What was the word we used?
Ecosystem.
An ecosystem. We've migrated to platform. We like that better. B ut in part, though, because each of them is sort of self-reinforcing, and so if you attract more providers to your network, you bring more distribution volume. You bring more scale for your GPO. That enables those businesses to grow, then you take the data that's flowing through the 2,700 providers that are using our proprietary EMR, we call it iKnowMed, our system. Now we've got more scale in our data. We've got broader insights that we can bring to both the oncologists to allow them to practice oncology more efficiently and with better outcomes and to the biopharma companies who want to understand how is this actually used and what are the barriers to use and how can I accelerate that, so that adds scale there.
Then as you grow your network, you can accrue more clinical trials, which, and the more you build a clinical trial business and an Ontada data business, the more attractive you are to attract providers and the more attractive you are to attract biopharma partners. That's why we talk about it as a platform. It does. I mean, the drug distribution GPO services are the bulk of the $35 billion. As I showed in the presentation, as you migrate to those other services, the margin profiles accrete.
So the margin's much better on those other services versus distribution. Outside of oncology, do you have interest in other ologies when we think about your specialty market?
Can I take this one?
Sure.
I think to Brian's point, where if you looked at the chart that he showed, the drug innovation and drug investment, where there are going to be other areas, and we believe there will be other areas where the drug investment will continue to grow over time, we can build out a platform rather than just bringing providers together and managing practices. What we want to do is add value along the way. Add value from the capabilities we have in drug distribution, bringing GPOs together, and then building out those other capabilities and services, whether that be research and clinical trials or data. So we think that there's going to be other opportunities where we will see other ologies grow and have that investment and innovation. That would be a great opportunity for us to build a platform.
But we're interested in building platforms and not simply just managing providers because the economics are not there to just simply manage providers. But where you can add all these other capabilities, then there is an opportunity to really make a good investment and a good production.
And I think the key you just said is an opportunity. I mean, we still think oncology is the biggest segment. We still think there is a ton of runway and growth for us in oncology. But if we can leverage off that success and experience into another opportunity, we would do that.
I mean, obviously, we're at a large healthcare conference where we talk a lot about innovation. Again, I think if you look at new drug development, most is in oncology, right?
Right.
But on the flip side, over the last several years, a number of drugs have lost patent protection. What are your thoughts around biosimilars? And I know I've asked this so many different times, but how should we think about the opportunity in biosimilars, especially within oncology and the margin opportunity around that versus traditional distribution?
So in general, I mean, we're big proponents of biosimilars and anxious to see that market continue to expand and evolve. But candidly, we're still in the pretty early innings. I mean, I think there's 60 approvals and 40-ish commercially available biosimilars today. And the market is figuring out what the model is going to be and the uptake is going to be. As we think about biosimilars in general, the channel and what the nature of that biosimilar is will matter a lot to us. To the extent it's an oncologic that's going to be used in a community-based setting, that's where we can provide the most services and support of the adoption and the use of that biologic. And that's where we think our economics will be best.
To the extent it's in a mail-order channel or a Part D drug, we're going to have a little bit less meaningful for us. But in the macro level, if you think about it, the margin for us will settle somewhere between a traditional brand product and a generic product.
Still better than a generic.
Still better and maybe typically are higher priced than a generic as well. So the gross profit dollars are relevant as well.
Prescription Technology Solutions. I know you've had tons and tons of questions around that. You broke out some of the components today, right? When we think about that business, Britt, I heard you talk when we had the sell-side analyst day, as well as other times around the different components and the different profit drivers. Can you maybe just remind people how to think about Prescription Technology Solutions and what are some of the bigger drivers here?
Yeah. So again, this is another business that Brian showed how we've built this over time. We've built a lot of capabilities in here. And we think about this business on an annual basis. If you look at the last five years, this business has grown over 11% compounded annually. And as you look at our guide for this year, we're guiding 11%-15% growth again. The linearity is not where everybody would like to be able to do it from a modeling perspective, but we really focus on the drivers within the business. And I think there's several different factors that can lead to some of this volatility. We've talked about prescription trends and utilization trends generally. That's an impact.
Certainly, the timing and trajectory of new product launches is an impact to this business, as well as the evolution and maturity of programs that we support for biopharma manufacturers. Those programs will shift as drugs mature, as programs mature, and our support for those mature. We've talked about drug supply and stability in the supply. That will create some volatility in the business. And then as you think about our access services, which are roughly 25% of the revenue this year, certainly there are payer management strategies and formularies that impact the volatility within that business as well. And as Brian talked about, we've been investing in this business for the last several years, building out additional capabilities and services to support the growth within the segment, as well as new growth and opportunities and drivers that we have.
So the timing and size of those investments during the year can also play from a quarter-to-quarter basis. But if you look at this business on an annual basis, very consistently, we've grown this above the long-term target range that we've provided at 11%-12%. We feel very confident in the strength of the business this year. The second half, one of the other drivers is we have an annual verification program that we support in our fiscal fourth quarter and only in our fiscal fourth quarter. And we've been very successful with that verification program the last several years. We anticipate it's going to be another strong year for us. So there's a lot of components to the business. There's a lot of capabilities that we have that span across access, affordability, and adherence. And there are a number of drivers that can create the quarter-to-quarter volatility.
There's a lot of focus on the access component, which a lot of people think of as a prior authorization type of product. Really, as more employers are covering things like GLP-1s, maybe initially you cover, you have a PA on the first script and then maybe some interim, but not on every single script. Is that variability having any impact on the business?
Yeah. Well, I'll start. Again, if you think about prior authorizations, maybe just I'll focus a little bit on GLP-1s as an example. If you think about GLP-1s, first of all, we provide the programs that support all the major GLP-1 programs and manufacturers. So if there's a prior authorization necessary, we're going to support that through our technology services. Even within GLP-1s, I talked about payer management strategies and formularies. If you break out GLP-1s, there are different requirements between an obesity-level drug and a weight loss drug in terms of how frequently is the PA required to be updated and validated, what percentage of PAs are required by certain providers. So there's a volatility across a payer matrix. We've seen continued growth there. We support all of the major manufacturers and drugs that have prior authorization. We provide a number of services beyond initiation, submission.
We help with denial conversion and rejects and other reporting. So there's a breadth of services within prior authorization that I think we feel very good about and that we continue to invest in.
Great. So maybe we can shift to the medical supply side of your business for a couple of minutes. That's one area where I would say the growth has been a little bit slower than what you initially had expected. A couple of questions here. One, maybe talk about what you're seeing on the utilization side in the marketplace. And then two, more specifically, maybe walk us through what some of the issues are for the Medical-Surgical business and how you think you can fix those issues?
Sure. I mean, the first thing I want to say, since I didn't focus on this a lot during the presentation, is this is a great business. This is a business that's focused on what we call alternate site. You can think of it as really just non-acute care hospital settings with its history in serving primary care and long-term care. But now, over the years, they've expanded into urgent care clinics, retail clinics, surgeries, ambulatory surgery centers. Anywhere a patient might present outside of a hospital setting, you'll find this business there. And it's not just core commodity medical products. It could be the equipment that's on the wall. It could be the setup of the clinic. It could be pharmaceuticals. It could be specialty pharmaceuticals. It could be lab equipment and supplies and reagents. So a broad portfolio of products into a largely community-focused care setting.
I think the business over the last many, many years has done a phenomenal job continuing on that expansion path and will continue to do that, follow the patients where they present in the ambulatory settings. The business has performed terrifically in the last five years. It's got double-digit AOP growth. The last couple of quarters have been soft. We think part of that is attributable to just kind of post-COVID normalization. I'm sorry I have to say that word. We all like to think it's way in the rearview mirror. There was a lot of volatility in the medical market that we historically hadn't seen. We think some of that is just playing out. We don't think it's fundamentally a competitive issue. We think it's just a market softness issue.
At our scale and our reach and our strategic positioning, we will be able to navigate this.
And the other thing I would mention, if you go back to the guidance we gave at the beginning of the year, we contemplated some of the softness coming off of COVID. Remember, we played a larger role through the COVID period with certainly being the centralized administrator of supplies for the government program. So we already played a larger role. We anticipated this and we gave guidance of AOP growth of 6%-8% year-over-year. Our updated guidance is to be at the low end of that 6%-8%. Inherent in that, certainly a big component of the business is the illness season. And as we think about the illness season there, each one of them is unique. We certainly can see some illness seasons will start earlier. Some will be later in the year.
So we try to take a middle-of-the-road approach to what we would say if we look over the last five or 10 years and take an average severity in terms of how we plan for that. Last year, we saw a softer illness season than the previous five. And this year, thus far, as we kind of get through the December month end, what we've seen this year is a softer illness season to last year. And as we look at where we think this year is so far compared to the last five years based on acuity of data, it's at about 62% of the severity of the average of the last five. So it gives you some indication that that has had an impact on the business as well.
Now, again, as I said, each season is unique and we'll see how the rest of the year plays out. But that also has had an impact on the business this year.
If I think about that business over time, you've acquired products, right? Procured products where you have a private label aspect to that? If the Trump administration moves forward with tariffs, will there be an impact on your ability to procure those products at the same rates that you have today? And what are your thoughts around any impact from a Trump tariff?
I think the administration has talked sort of in broad strokes about tariffs.
Yeah.
How that specifically is going to get translated into medical products or pharmaceutical products has been a lot less specificity around. So we would plan for multiple scenarios, if you will. I mean, the key, one of the things about this business is our sourcing strategy. And one of the lessons we, I think, probably as an industry, but certainly McKesson took away from the prior five years is the need to make sure you have diverse sources of supply. And because we don't manufacture, we don't have fixed capital, inflexible, our sourcing strategy can be a little bit more nimble. So we have been diversifying over the years. We would obviously continue to look to do that. And it will depend on how these tariffs play out.
If they play out broadly across all countries and all trading partners, that's a lot different than if it's specific countries and specific trading partners. We are active in public policy and we will make sure that our regulators and legislators understand the potential impacts to the supply chain and to patient care should they roll out broadly. But I would say the flexibility in our sourcing strategies give us some confidence. And this is a business also, Lisa, that you would know. We do have some pricing. We can manage pricing too. And so to the extent we don't want to pass it on, we look to offset it any way we could. But to the extent we need to, we can.
Are you seeing any changes when you think about pricing and you think about the competitiveness of the medical supply market, or medical-surgical market? Are you seeing any changes competitively?
I think I just said in answering the prior question, I think that our view is this is more of a market phenomenon, some post-COVID normalization or dynamics, some volatility.
So this isn't like one competitor's market?
We've been in this business for decades. We've got essentially the same competitive set that we've always had. They're great competitors. We respect them as I hope they respect us. But I think this has been more of some softness in the market than a shift in the nature of competition.
Can we spend a minute on capital deployment?
Sure.
You have.
My voice is going off.
I know.
So it's going to be a good one. It's good timing.
We can move over to capital deployment for a minute. Free cash flow guidance and share repurchase guidance for 2025 looks very robust. Is it fair to say that incremental M&A is less likely post-Florida Cancer Specialists?
No. I think, let me say it this way. There are three pillars to our capital deployment program. As Brian and I have both said over time, we like to start by growing the business. So the most important thing for us is to grow the business and do it on strategy, and so Florida Cancer is a good example of an area of strategy and importance to us and being able to deploy capital against that. So we would like to do that. If we can find areas that are on strategy that add to platforms that we have in oncology or biopharma services and have the right financial return, we want to do that. We are going to continue to deploy capital back to our shareholders. You talked about our share repurchase program.
This year, we increased the guidance for share repurchases in our last quarter to $3.2 billion for this year. And we feel really good about our ability to generate good free cash flow, to deploy that against some M&A opportunities to grow the business, but to also deploy capital not only in growing the dividend, but through share repurchases and create value for our shareholders in that way as well. And underlying all that is the maintenance of the strength of our balance sheet and our investment-grade credit rating, which I feel like we've done a really good job of over the last several years, providing a really strong foundation for us to grow from.
On the divestiture side, you talked about selling Rexall, but still very committed to the Canadian market. Can you maybe just spend a minute and just remind people what assets you still have in Canada? I know you're a big distributor, but what are some of the things? And are there other potential businesses in Canada that would be interesting?
Yeah. I mean, we have a pretty diverse set of capabilities in Canada beyond just the leading distributor, and we're the leading distributor for not just community pharmacy and banners, but hospital as well. We wrap around that, biopharma services. We have an infusion business, so we really like the strategic positioning of the Canadian business. The exit of retail pharmacy just became a capital allocation and a focus decision for us, and so we think we preserve the strength of all those great assets I just talked about, but narrow the focus and speed and agility by getting out of the business, and that's an analogous approach we take across the whole business, so we really like the Canadian business. We think we're an important player in the position of healthcare in Canada and an influential voice, and we're very committed to it.
It's another really good example. Historically, we have been really allocating capital back to places of growth. Then we've done that with change, with Europe. This is just another example of us really running two areas of growth and freeing up capital to generate higher returns and to build out our platforms in a more differentiated way.
We have one minute left, Brian.
Oh, gosh.
No, but very quickly. Anything you want to leave investors with? What will they appreciate about McKesson over the next 12 months that maybe they don't appreciate today?
I hope they appreciate some of this today. But I think they're going to appreciate the strength of our team. I think they're going to appreciate the strength of our diversified portfolio of companies. They're going to appreciate our ability to continue to innovate and solve healthcare problems that underpin and support the growth we've historically had and we expect to have into the future. Thank you all very much. We appreciate your interest and support in McKesson.
Great. Thanks so much. Thank you.