An interesting first quarter. Let me start with that. Why don't you sort of catch us up on what you saw happening in the first quarter and how it starts, or sets the path for the remainder of the year?
Yeah, excellent. No, I appreciate, and thanks everyone for taking the time, those that are here, those that are listening. Yeah, so look, whenever you start the year, I think you've made certain assumptions at the start of the year. And what was really nice about the quarter is the quarter played out largely as expected. As you think of revenue, we had two dynamics that we were expecting, right? There was China, there were some China headwinds in particular, VBP. And then we had the respiratory comp dynamic, which was a combination of we're starting to see respiratory season move from kind of like what it looked like in the pandemic back to a more normal pre-pandemic kind of dynamic, which we can talk more about, of course. Those two items played out as expected.
They did create kind of a headwind that we were planning for on top line. If you exclude those items, we were strong mid-single digit growth right around 5%. So it was really isolated against those two items. The other important thing was, of course, you know we're always making assumptions around level of cost improvement we can drive.
Thank you, everybody, for joining us.
Inflationary dynamics.
Excited to have Max Krakowiak here. We'll spend about 40 minutes going through fireside chat format.
From my standpoint, actually over delivered on margin.
Yeah, I'm Patrick Donnelly, the tools, diagnostics analyst at Citi.
That always does as you're moving through the year, seeing plans play out.
So Max, yeah, I don't know if you want to give any opening remarks. Maybe we can just start.
At the end, on the back end.
You guys obviously reported relatively recently.
Very.
Earnings are somehow still going on for the group.
We did a few things. One we.
Yeah, you guys gave a pretty balanced 2024 guide.
Guidance up.
Yeah, Q1 starting a little slower as is on life sciences.
So we do.
I just want to talk about the expectations for the year and then we can kind of dive into some specifics.
Performance, but our confidence and awareness.
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having us.
We can certainly talk more about.
You know, I think as we look at.
I haven't seen good news starting with 2023.
I think obviously it was a tough year, more challenging than what we had anticipated on the onset of the year. If you look at sort of the trends of what we noticed, you know really it was kind of around the June.
Can we drive this phase of initial sort of slowdown, particularly from our pharmacy customers? And then once everyone sort of came back from vacation in the summer months in September, it was really where we saw an even more, I would say, incremental step down in sort of their purchasing behaviors. And then really as sort of the fourth quarter played out, it was sort of a consistent, I would say, cautionary tone throughout each of the months. We were maybe slightly better than what we had anticipated coming into the fourth quarter. But it wasn't necessarily any inflection points across those months. I would say it was relatively consistent. That's more or less how we really believe the demand environment's going to play out for that customer group here over the course of 2024.
So from a guidance or outlook perspective, I don't think we're expecting some significant ramp-up. There's obviously some different quarter dynamics just with comps and other things. But I think from an overall perspective, our stance or outlook for 2024 sort of embedded a similar market environment that will be really expected.
We're going to follow our original plan over the past four or five months.
Yeah.
The way we plan quarterly.
I guess on that cautionary tone, you know it seems like we're seeing a few biotech deals a day, seeing uncertain, we chatted a little bit about it.
A heavier queue.
Yeah, how do you think about just that backdrop? Is it there's a little more confidence in the market with the window at least being temporarily open? Maybe just kind of refresh how you guys think about that biotech segment and how quickly, if at all, we could see a return with things at least seeming pretty positive on the capital markets?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I guess if you really look at that, most of that is, I would say, pre-revenue biotech-type funding. If you look at that customer group for us, it's about 10% of our life sciences business from a customer group perspective. I would say obviously 2023 was a very challenging year for that group. It was down sort of mid-20s% throughout the course of the year. So we've got easier comp dynamics just for that customer group overall. And then when you add on top of that some of the increased funding we've seen here in Q1, we do expect that customer group to perform better. Our portfolio is positioned well to take advantage of that. But I would just say, again, overall, you know it's hard to see how quickly that sort of additional funding translates to actual orders and purchasing.
Obviously if there's more biotech, that will be important.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then maybe we can start on the life sciences and we'll jump into diagnostics. You know the life science piece, you guys among others, so the instrument piece feels some pressure certainly. Yeah, we've heard some maybe slightly positive tone in terms of the data points on instruments from some of the peers. But maybe you can just talk about the backdrop there, what the expectations are. And again, maybe what could turn things around a little bit on more of the capital base. I know not the biggest piece, but.
Yeah, for sure. So if we look at our instrumentation on the life sciences side, it was down high single digits from 2023. We have similar expectations for the business from 2024 being about down high single digits. I think if you look at the different pieces of that portfolio, I wouldn't say there's one particular piece of our instrumentation business that's standing out from another. I would say that geographically, you know in 2023, we still performed relatively well within China. It was still positive growth for us from an instrumentation standpoint for the full year. Obviously, as the stimulus kind of trailed off, you know in Q4, that presented some headwinds. We're anticipating, I would say, a relatively similar demand environment globally for our instrumentation in 2024. Again, you have the comp dynamics between the first half and second half.
I think overall, we're expecting a relatively similar dynamic that we had exiting the fourth quarter. Then I think if you look at just broadly, you know what would sort of the different inflection points be, you know generally our order book is somewhere between a quarter or two in terms of lead time. I think that's a trend, again, we'll continue to monitor. From an external standpoint, we are expecting really, I would say, similar lead time.
Yeah. When you look at your instrumentation portfolio, are there certain areas where you're seeing maybe more impact than others? Maybe just kind of talk through the portfolio and where you're seeing the most impact.
From the pharma biotech group in particular? You know so if you look at our life sciences business, again, the three main pieces of it, you have the reagents, which is the predominant more than 50% of life sciences business. Instrumentation is about 30% of the overall portfolio. And then you've got the remaining pieces of which is our software business. When you look at where we've sort of had or seen some of the impact, I would say specifically around the instrumentation, that's heavily tied into their CapEx budgets. I think from that standpoint, we've already kind of addressed some of the market dynamics there. I would say on the reagent side, again, if you look at the trends that we experienced in 2023, it wasn't really in sort of that September time period where we really noticed sort of a clear step change in the customer behavior.
You know our reagents business is predicated on, I would say, consistent research activity levels. What we really noticed in September was there was a lot more noise from our large pharma customer groups around site relocations, you know, pausing of certain projects. From that standpoint, it's been a little bit choppier really since September. I would say the Q4 demand was relatively consistent. For our reagents business, that is sort of the leading indicator for us. We need to see a little bit more of a stabilized environment in terms of lab activity. But the business continued to perform well overall. Mid-single digit positive growth in 2023. We're expecting a similar output for 2024.
Then if you look on the software side of things, you know, 2023, we had foreshadowed before the year even started sort of agnostic to the market. It was going to be a tough year for that business just given the timing of some of their contract renewals. That dynamic flips in 2024. We have strong visibility into that business. Our software business will actually go from declining high single digits in 2023 to growing high single digits.
Yeah, maybe we kind of hit there on the software piece. Can you just talk about kind of the mix? You mentioned the contract renewals. There's also some of the business going out and getting new contracts. Can you just talk about kind of that split? And then you kind of hit on you feel good about the visibility. Maybe just talk about the visibility in each of those. And obviously, the recurring piece is going to be easier. But in terms of going out and maybe getting some new contracts as well.
Yeah, so maybe just even to step back more broadly to talk about our overall Signals business. I think it's probably one of the more underappreciated aspects of our portfolio. Again, now it's part of the transformation. It's a bigger piece of the pie. So we're trying to be able to highlight it more and spend more time discussing it. That business is about $200 million in revenue. Yeah, I would say historically, over the past four or five years, it's grown in sort of a mid-teens CAGR. So it's a business that is going to continue to grow in the future too, especially as we start continuing innovating and launching new software releases. If you look at that business, though, there's a couple of different dynamics that play out. One is that from a revenue recognition standpoint, it depends whether you're selling on-prem and SaaS.
That causes a lot of volatility. That's what we saw play out in 2023. If you look at the underlying growth of our software business in 2023, it actually grew high single digits. It's just a revenue recognition standpoint in terms of, again, when your contract's coming up for renewal, is it an On-Prem solution or is it a SaaS offering that you're selling? So we feel really good about that business. As we looked into 2024, about 85% of it, I would say, is strong visibility and more or less known either from a renewal standpoint or it's just a SaaS waterfall or backlog. So from that standpoint, we have a high degree of confidence, particularly around the renewals. We generally have an upper 90s%. So from that standpoint, it is more or less, I would say, a high degree of confidence.
There's generally about 10%-15% of go-get in terms of new deals. I would say for 2024, we probably that's less than that. Assumed in our guidance right now is the new deals have been more challenging just given the kind of funding environment. But on a normal year, it's generally about 10%-15% of their go-get earnings.
I guess with those go-gets, I mean, is it just kind of the pharma budgets? How do you think about what backdrop you need to kind of see that come back a little bit? And what do those purchasing decisions look like?
Yeah, I think it's, I mean, we haven't gotten that specific, but I don't think it's a reasonable thing.
Yeah, I mean, again, it depends on whether they're buying a SaaS offering from us, if they're buying on-prem. If it's an on-prem solution, you know, that for the customer is more of a CapEx decision. That's going to be heavily tied to sort of their CapEx budget. If it's a SaaS, it's a little bit more easier from that standpoint, from a budgetary standpoint. It's operating expense for them and generally not going to have as material of an impact. So from that standpoint, I think it really does depend on what we're selling. And I think what we've seen from customers is on the larger purchases, similar to the instrumentation side, they're a little bit more cautious, right? So that's what we factored in for our guidance for 2024. Obviously, if that comes back stronger, that's going to be an additional tailwind for our software business.
But on a foundational level, I think our software business, we remain incredibly excited about the future. Yeah. And yeah, we'll spend more time on margins in a little bit. But just in terms of the software piece, how do you think about the margin profile there? Typically, when you think software, you think pretty high margins. How should we think about particularly the impact of the decline last year and some growth this year?
Yeah, so I mean, even if you just step back more broadly, I mean, our life sciences margins last year were mid to upper 30%.
This is going to lead me right into my next question.
So that business overall has a very strong margin profile. Our software business is accretive to our overall life sciences. So that can give you a little bit of a direction in terms of its margin profile. I think the other piece then too is if you have a decline in that business, yeah, it's going to be a headwind from a mix perspective for sure. I would also say, though, the margin profile of our software business is one of its biggest differentiators. If you look at it in the context of some of the peers, most of them are closer to break-even. So from that standpoint, we've got, I would say, a really mature business, at least from a margin profile.
It does contribute to our earnings.
Okay. And then maybe we can shift over to the reagents piece, like you said, yourself, from a little bit late last year. Yeah, maybe just talk through the outlook there, what you're seeing, and maybe even the competitive side. There's obviously been some changes broadly on the protein reagents antibody side. So yeah, maybe just kind of talk about that business.
Yeah, so again, in 2023, our reagents business on the life sciences side finished in the positive mid-single digits range. The expectation for 2024 is a similar assumption from a demand environment perspective. I would say if you step back and kind of look more broadly, though, at our overall reagents portfolio, you know the fastest piece of the portfolio continues to be the performance of the BioLegend product line. I think as you look at BioLegend, you know it's a little bit different, I would say, than the legacy Revvity reagents portfolio in the sense that it has a much higher academic and government revenue exposure standpoint. So that continued to be really, really strong growth. I would say the one area of the reagent portfolio that really stood out was the performance in academic and government with BioLegend. That's really kind of their DNA, right?
They're at the cutting edge of technology and science. They work very closely with the key opinion leaders across the academic and government research sites. And so I think that'll be an area that continues to grow, you know, ahead of our overall reagents portfolio. Other than that, though, I would say it's across the rest of the portfolio and really geographically, it's relatively consistent.
Yeah, and you touched on the academic government. We certainly got a lot of questions about this year, everything from continued resolution to some of the different geographies. You know, how are you feeling broadly on the academic government spend, to your point, held in really well last year across the industry? What's the outlook? Have you seen any pause in terms of that customer base?
From a pause standpoint, I would say probably not. But again, if you boil it back up to our overall academic and government exposure, we are a little bit different, I would say, than the broader peers that in that we actually have, you know, a majority of it almost coming from the BioLegend reagents. And so from us, from the CapEx standpoint with the academic government, it's a much smaller exposure for us overall. They did have easier comps in 2023, right? You had the energy crisis in Europe that, you know, made 2022 challenging. So there were definitely some comp dynamics that played out in 2023. I think as we look at 2024, I would expect our guidance assumes more of a muted sort of growth on the instrumentation side.
We think, obviously, right now, I think funding will be, I think, relatively consistent year-over-year from that standpoint. And then obviously, we're going to have, I think, stronger growth from the reagents side of BioLegend.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, maybe on BioLegend, obviously, that was a big deal a few years ago, I guess, at this point. We just talked about the trends you're expecting. When you bought it, it seemed like the whole market was growing pretty healthy in the double digits. So we saw a little bit, certainly some peers slowing quite a bit and then actually a little bit better. Talk about why you didn't have a growth seemingly in the markets.
You literally had, with the outsized inflation, FX and inventory, almost 600 basis points as a headwind.
You had our margin did not contract nearly as much of that. Again, I think where the BioLegend was all significantly moderate. What that means is we're driving significant levels of cost improvement to the 150, even inclusive of absorbing outsized inflation. So really, once we shut ourselves of those, you really get a natural drive to move through the quarters to get to where we need to be. The other thing I'll say is like, look, we've had two years of being very predictive with cost and headwinds. We fully executed and delivered against our margin the past two years. We're one of the few companies that's back to pre-pandemic margin levels. We hit that last year from a high profit margin.
I think the rest of the portfolio, though, I think we'll continue to see.
We're 75% last year through our goal of getting to 25% by 2025. This year gets us to 80%.
Do you guys think there's any share?
We feel really good about what we've done the past two years. It's been top quartile performance.
I would say in pockets for sure.
Margin execution. We just have a strong inventory simplification program as we think of moving through 2024 into 2025.
Acquisitions, we think that's probably a net positive for us. When we think about pricing, you don't naturally sell business disruption anytime you're going through an acquisition. So I think if anything that might be available.
When the Q or K comes out is one of the first things we go looking for. How do we think about the sustainability of that?
That's what we shared. I think of it as kind of two phases. One just for some historical context. I think BD's typically been stronger in terms of price dynamics.
Specific areas of science where we can really.
A lot of medtech. Depends on the category, but it's not unusual to see kind of.
Maybe unlike science in specific in China.
BD's been closer to a flat.
Maybe just talk about what you're seeing.
Historically, again, we had.
As we navigated through kind of really outsized inflation.
We did take some outsized.
Price.
So what do you guys see in that?
Before we go, that was not the predominant lever of solving inflation. It's really been the simplification programs underlying that and the leverage on the strong growth profile that's enabled.
Well, what we did through that is we built really new muscle capability on pricing, really understanding the value proposition of the portfolio.
I think there's a couple of dynamics that really play out for us here.
Focused on many pillars, contract compliance, what we're doing from service revenue, how you think of value in new product launches, portfolio mix. So we have a holistic playbook across every region, across every business to drive price. So we view this as sort of a new capability. We think last year was sort of the peak of the market. It's kind of the first time we've really seen it.
I think on a go-forward basis, you can think of us as trying to drive toward a model.
I think that's more or less our assumption in 2024.
Low single digit price, quarter value between 1%-2%, something in that range.
We'll see how that plays out.
That's really been a change.
We feel good about the capabilities we've built in-house.
We're going to need to continue to put that stimulus back in if they really want to.
Does that make you less, more on different? To deliver 5.5% + 11%?
I think it's a temporary thing, but I think.
I think the nice thing about our growth profile, we're not dependent on one thing in terms of driving outsized growth like we have done.
Are you guys thinking about?
Also, I would say it's nice because.
Should reagents come back first?
Look, things happen in the beginning.
China this year that we're talking about. If you look at our top-line guide, right?
Doesn't sound like much recovery this year.
5.8%.
Just as we work our way through.
With absorbing a China headwind.
Yeah, I think it's the beauty of BD's profile. We've done a nice job of increasing our margin. We have all these different levers that we can pull to help drive that.
Let's talk about China. Anything new there?
I think the instrumentation generally, you know, we can follow that. A couple of things. Maybe just give everyone some context. So one, that was one of the things that like when we entered Q1, did we call volume-based procurement the right way, right? It was a headwind. China was down 5%.
Maybe a good time to transition.
It was very much in line with what we predicted. Actually, they did slightly better. It's very much indexed against our MDS portfolio.
What are you guys seeing there?
They've gone through this before. We had a great team in there that does a nice job of thinking of as we go through those, how do we maintain a strong volume position in the market? Yeah. And how do we go to market maybe differently? Digital capabilities to help kind of moderate some of the negative pricing dynamics.
Then even within that, the biggest piece is our Immunodiagnostics.
I would say it's very isolated. You still have UNCERTAIN. And you have our life sciences portfolio that is growing minimum, high single digits. We continue to see those that'll do that. And then as we navigate through the back half of this year, this really started late Q4. And so there's a Q4 headwind that becomes a favorable comp this year in China. It's part of that kind of growth acceleration we see in our phasing this year. And so China's playing out as expected. Look, it's still a strong market, right? We want to be there to kind of serve those patients that there's significant unmet needs. We have a great portfolio. We're focused on kind of how we go to market to maintain profitability.
Tying it into a question we get all the time is.
I think the other important thing is strategically with China, what we've done. We're not dependent on sourcing from China, right? You want to make sure that.
You're not dependent on manufacturing dynamics that somehow impact the rest of your business. So think of kind of like a China for China strategy. For the most part, as it relates to innovation and manufacturing.
You have local manufacturing?
We do, but that's, again, is more China for China. We're not sourcing China. There was one place where we were single-sourced, which goes back to more of our COVID portfolio, COVID only. We're actually now dual-sourced there. The rest of our business is not dependent on sourcing from China for the rest of the year.
Put in VBP. There's more local products.
There's about 7%.
The rest of our portfolio, there's still gaps.
There's communication to improve in the back half of the year and then all clear into next year? Or how do we think about rolling VBP?
We don't think that that's happening.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's always there to a degree. I mean, even before this year, it kind of just becomes a way of doing business. I think this was more of a bit of an outsized dynamic. We're not seeing that as playing out as expected. So I do think like it stabilizes as we go through the year. We talked about China this year still being kind of a low single-digit grower, especially. And then as we move into the back half of the year, you kind of cycle through the negative comp and a little bit of a China strategy takes over a growth profile.
Increased profitability.
Supportive of our kind of more total BD 55+.
More attractive stuff.
Let's talk about certain products. Which ones are you the most?
Really, the benefit that you get from economical standpoint.
Maybe bigger picture.
What we've been trying to trade off with the ASP.
Systematically trying to do here is increase BDs.
The other piece is just shutting down any R&D.
What you've seen now, including this guide, basically an organic growth rate of almost 7%.
That's where we get the economical benefit of ASP.
Which is really strong.
Even this year, by the way, right? This COVID-only dynamic that's moved away from other folks as well.
Get people focused on the.
Do you feel like you fully have it encompassed?
We've done it in a few different ways. One, portfolio-type actions, right? We spun them back to we divested the real. These were all negative to our growth profile. They were kind of more low single digit to flat growth. That's had a lift on our average WAMGR that we participated. We've been very strategic about tucking M&A. We've deployed about $3 billion capital. We're acquiring creative margin and growth assets. We'll talk more about that later if you want. But it's been a nice contributor. Last year's example that contributed 40 basis points to our growth profile organically so that we don't count the one-time lift. It's not about one-time lift. It's about adding assets to growing high single digit, double digit, and strengthening your overall growth profile. And then lastly, R&D. We've been very focused. We increased the amount of R&D.
We've completely enhanced our delivery of milestones, one-time launches. We've got hyper-focused on those metrics. And then the mix of our portfolio, we now have 60% of our R&D indexed against entire growth spaces. And so all that has led to this 7% growth profile, just under 7%. In terms of areas, we're a big company. We have a lot of businesses to talk about. So we try to simplify. What are the things that are where we're going to sort of drive differentiated capital allocation and that will be consistent higher growth performers? I think there's six key areas. Alaris is one that we talked about. That's kind of like a separate event that we looked at. Continue to be super positive. But in addition to that, if you look across our three segments, in BDI, you have in our PI business, peripheral vascular disease.
You have our PureWick franchise in incontinence. That's been a consistent high single digit grower.
Yeah. Okay. And maybe on the.
Life Sciences. We have our Biosciences business that's performed really well. It's differentiated, actually, versus peers in the marketplace. Then we have our molecular diagnostic business as well. I think BD COR, BD MAX.
Maybe just talk about what the growth.
In medical, we have pharmacy automation. I'll go through some examples of how strategically we're driving this. Then pharma systems with prefilled syringes. On the trends of biologics, everyone thinks of it as GLP-1. There's much more than GLP-1s that are good trends in there to think about. But certainly, we are benefiting from that positive index. The nice thing about all of these are there's examples of capital deployment in a differentiated way going into each of these businesses. So pharma systems is an example. We've over-indexed in capital expenditure deployment to ensure we've got capacity. Pharmacy automation is a great example. We acquired Parata, $1.5 billion acquisition. Basically, more than basically double the size of our pharmacy automation business. But we now have a $700 million product automation business with this creative to margin, creative to growth.
Then there's been strong organic focus. Maybe the next discovery platform is BD Diagnostics. That's all driven from our internal positions, organic innovation and R&D platforms. You can see that strategy playing across all three of those buckets around how we're deploying capital in those spaces. Those six areas comprise about 25% of BD's business. And if they alone just grow, pick a number in pricing, it can add over 200 basis points to BD's total growth rate, which means you just need the rest of BD to grow more at that lower mid-single digit to get to the 5.5 plus. That's the strategy. By the way, we have some other exciting assets in the other parts of this. And I think that's the best way to simplify those areas that we should stay focused on. But we certainly have other things.
There's some medtech companies that make acquisitions, pause, digest, make acquisitions, pause, digest. And then there are other medtech companies that are annual, semi-annual.
Further ability for us to buy, integrate, or it becomes organic.
What do you think? Is there a mantra for BD's M&A strategy? Or is it as it comes along?
Sort of the market exposure with the U.S.
One, it does tie to this kind of cash discipline, right? We want to continue to drive strong free cash flow. Then maybe this is firepower capacity to doing M&A. We want to be disciplined around our net leverage target. We kind of have this target of around 2.5.
Maybe a little bit on the expectations.
We drive that. We'll create firepower. It's about communication, strategic, and disciplined on the deals that we've done. We've done a really good job with these deals ensuring we're creative to growth. They're creative to margin. We're absorbing the EPS impact as we do these deals, right? The first year, oftentimes, we have one-time expenses.
If you look at that.
We're absorbing all that, not impacting our growth rates. In many cases, like Prahlad, it was actually positive.
50% is just.
So there has to be a strong discipline and patience as you deploy these. And really clear metrics that we guide towards. But I do think you're going to see this natural rhythm of build cash, get your net leverage down, stripe on an opportunity as it becomes available, integrate it successfully, get the value of it. You may lever up a little bit. It doesn't change your credit rating as you do that and you deploy cash. Focus on success. Lever back down and then do another one. So it's kind of that cycle. The other thing that we did share is we've done $3 billion in capital deployment. The first $1.5 billion. I think the average deal size.
More upfront capital requirements. It's something that's just been a little bit more.
I guess 17 deals.
Order management of 17 engagements. Then we did Prahlad, 1 deal.
Once that funding environment improves, they are.
The chunkier ones, like it's almost the same amount of work sometimes. All those smaller deals, we like to move to these a little bit chunkier assets. I think they're more noticeable externally. They have a bigger impact business faster. With that said, as much as we'd like to do that, there's a role to the smaller ones because they become just like another way to do R&D. I think of it as a mix of we would like the majority of it to be larger, chunkier tuck-ins, and then reserve like 20%-30% to kind of the smaller supplementary R&D for our biotech customers from that standpoint of it is more of a capping thing.
One of the things that I've been fascinated by over the last couple of years is how much that can be.
Sort of upfront payments. So I don't know that there's like multiple ones in it. Again, most of these contracts are more or less known scope of the project. So once those, I would say, the budgets get a little bit more freed up from a customer perspective, it would be more or less.
Two things. The one nice thing about BD's portfolio is we were less impacted. The one thing you see in our profile.
Just to clarify, though.
If someone's going to an acute care setting using your product, we didn't have as much of the volatility in some of our base. Actually, there were some outsized opportunities, COVID-only actually being one of them.
I think on the last call, you guys talked a little bit about e-commerce opportunity.
I think the big trend shifts that is a positive for BD are these dynamics that you see play out in the healthcare sector, whether it be the number of availability of nurses.
Labor rates that are happening in hospitals. I think overall pressure that they're feeling. We're seeing the same dynamic play out in the pharmacy setting. Shortage of pharmacists and pharmacists per year now. Same thing, cost of pharmacists. Did you have that same kind of supply-demand dynamic playing out with labor? So the nice thing, some of these areas where we've been driving our strategy is anchored right against those trends in the form of solutions that can actually help them, right? So the product acquisition is a great example. It eliminates the time and counting pills and fully automates that process. Highly educated pharmacists spending time counting pills when they can actually do another key clinical activities, right? Especially as you think of trying to drive healthcare to different care settings. So I think that's a great example. Alaris is a great example when you think of interop.
We're the leader in terms of number of interop sites and the benefit that offers to nursing in terms of simplification of executing the work they need to do. That's a big one. We have examples of that throughout our portfolio that lend themselves in terms of I think some of those trends are the biggest ones. The more that you can bring value to the system with your portfolio is something that we're hyper-focused on.
One of the things I didn't hear you mention in terms of healthcare trends is margins are always a big focus. Where does that fit?
Yeah. We see for this year. So that's certainly a trend. I mean, we have, like, if you think of our strategy that we've talked about, there's three irreversible forces we've talked about that are whole. Again, capital allocation is accurate. It's chronic disease. It's new care settings. And then connected care.
Anything about this year?
I touched on a couple of those. I think the ASCs fits a bit right into the new care settings. We have innovation anchored against some of those things, different types of offerings.
I know it's not.
I think we have examples of, take for example, our Pyxis offering where you have a typical acute care setting offering that supports medication delivery. But we also have a different form that fits in like a long-term care facility that's more conducive to that environment. Same thing with Prahlad, actually. We're talking about retail pharmacy. They actually offer those as well.
Yes, we are anticipating flat margins.
So that's we throughout our portfolio. We talked about.
Growth is higher than 2%.
Life Sciences are mini-draw, which we just got.
But we've taken a lot of action, I would say, in 2023. We're expecting to ensure that we've got later this year, right? We kind of accelerated some of the cost.
It's a fingerstick blood draw that can be very conducive to doing that at 28%. What you're seeing play out in 2024.
Still done in a way that you got a quality blood draw.
It'll be done with a different type of finishing support versus what's in the acute care setting. So we very much have a strategy anchored in our portfolio against those three.
And so 2024, I think.
So you've never been at BD, if I count right, three years. What is it that you've accomplished?
In terms of some of the costs, what is it that you want to accomplish?
Like you said, you're actively kind of insulating the margins.
I think we've.
So they said we'll talk a little bit about what you guys have done on the structure inside.
The BD 2023, how we think about those benefits. We're simplifying our portfolio. We made some very clear portfolio choices.
A little bit of a leaner placement.
Like I shared earlier, how we're driving our WAMDRUP, which leads to a stronger growth profile. I think we fully solidified that.
You heard some of the commentary.
Personally, I've brought a lot to kind of what we do from a BD M&A standpoint and how we do that.
Yes.
There is going to be some strategy costs that, given our sort of growth rate, it's going to be easier for us to sort of grow it.
But the margin discipline and what we're driving for this year.
I think what you've seen now play out is a healthcare marketing program. We need to be more aggressive on, I think, taking out.
We can talk more about this. We're excited about getting 2025 and 2025. But honestly, like we laid out in an earlier conference this year, the momentum we have and the number of initiatives, as I look forward and maybe kind of a little bit to the question of like what's next.
I think our goal is.
I think we've done great work. It's continuing that momentum beyond 2025 with more of an emphasis on gross margin. What we'd really like to do is have gross margin be more the flywheel for investment, further fueling R&D, further fueling go-to-market resources. We think that's where the biggest opportunity is.
Integration is one of the most impacted by inflation. We rolled out a whole BD excellence initiative. We literally, like as a leadership team, we spent four months for a full week doing a Kaizen Event.
I'm sorry. What?
It's a Kaizen event. But literally, the principle is get out on the floor, observe what's happening, and fix it immediately.
Yeah. I guess when you think about 2024.
We have a high-powered team of coaches. We're really rolling this out. Last year, for example, 18 of our sites went through one of these major Kaizen events.
Have you done a Kaizen Event?
Yeah. So they're fun. So CFOs on the line. We're cleaning pallets that are moving products around and getting your hands dirty. It's good. But you're seeing a ton of momentum there in terms of improving OEE, driving waste improvement through our sites.
More than anything else.
I think if you look at it from a.
Good on the margin standpoint. Really good. I mean, we're top quartile in terms of how we've performed. He's been able to get back to pre-pandemic levels. But what you can hear is the excitement of there's more there that will continue this kind of double-digit growth profile.
That's really, I would say, what's driving it.
I think the cash focus is something I think more in the we have opportunity bucket. I think generally, medtech, when you look at inventory days or most standard metrics and compare to other industries, we're not as strong. And some of that is the nature of the industry. Some of it, I think, just becomes accepted. And our mindset is, what's a CPG company do? And what does this company do? Can we be better? And so you're seeing us take that mindset and drive cash flow to a higher place, which will also, again, drive that flywheel. So I think we have the right strategy. That's confident. You see it playing out in our base business.
I think we look forward to driving more of that. I think the things to look for go forward is more emphasis on gross margin with all the enablers we have there. And then continuing as a result of that, the margin will help with cash, the focus on cash. And then the inorganic kind of keep fueling the growth profile.
So Chris, a year from now, when we're sitting here, what are we going to be talking about?
Yeah. It's a little bit of what we just talked about. So one, I think, of course, we'll have much more clarity to the success on the LARIS. And talk about how that's been a key enabler. We're going to be able to share more around kind of gross margin and how we see that progressing to continue our goal of consistent double-digit earnings over periods of time. I think that's going to be a huge value a lot. But largely, I think you're seeing kind of the BD story play out and what we've done the past two years. This year complements it. You're seeing this nice growth profile. We've been well above the 5.5 plus. I think you know there's very few companies that are I think there's a couple I can think of that are consistently in that high single digit.
They have a different profile than BD. There's many that aspire to be where we are. And I think the nice thing is it's like high growth, but durable, given the nature of our portfolio. So you kind of get a little bit of the best of both worlds. It puts us in a differentiated place. And then I think the gross margin will drive reinvestment that'll help continue that. And then obviously, the value of the earnings we can talk about in the U.S. too as we talk about really helpful double-digit earnings. We're excited.
Well, thank you so much for joining us this morning at the Citi Unplugged meeting. Have a great day.
Yeah. Thank you. Great question. Thanks, everyone, for taking the time.
Again, our software business, this isn't something that's tied in necessarily to our instrumentation. This is separate from our instrumentation. This is really the ERP for the scientists across all the large pharma accounts. And so from that perspective, we continue to come out with new products and expand our reach in our large pharma accounts, as well as reaching new customer groups. So from that standpoint, we expect those three businesses on average to kind of grow 9%-11%. That's 60% of our business. That's already more or less giving us sort of a floor of 6% growth. And then you look at the other two components we broke out from an instrumentation perspective, roughly a quarter of our portfolio across Life Sciences and our Applied Genomics business, we anticipate them to grow sort of 3%-5%.
I think there's years where it's going to grow above that. And there's years where it might be a tougher environment like we're seeing now where it's going to be less than that. But on average, we think 3%-5% is sort of where we peg that long term. And then the last piece is Reproductive Health. Again, about 15% of our portfolio. We've penciled in sort of 2%-4%. And that 2%-4%, again, we're not anticipating some huge rebound from a birthrate perspective. I think we're anticipating at least similar to what we've seen over the past four or five years here. So if that birthrate ends up being stronger globally, that would just be additional tailwinds to us from an individual year.
Yep. Okay. I think we only have a couple of minutes left. So maybe some quick hitters. Just in terms of the guidance, I know you guys; we've talked a lot about it. Just, you really want to kind of set this bar where you can execute on, not be kind of the old PerkinElmer. I guess when you think about the guidance philosophy for this year, when you look at the 1Q, it was a little bit lighter, again, as was everyone in tools. Do you have more visibility into 1Q and maybe layered in more conservatism versus the full year? How do you think about just that near-term versus the full-year guidance and levels of conservatism layered in?
Yeah. I don't know if there's different layers of conservatism as we think about sort of the near-term versus long-term for the full year here. I would say that from our standpoint, again, our underlying assumption is that the demand environment, particularly around our pharma biotech customers, remains similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter. I think there's some Revvity-specific tailwinds that happen throughout the course of the year.