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"Joining in the Q&A after Bob and Mike's comments will be Jacob Thaysen, President of Agilent's Life Sciences and Applied Markets Group; Sam Raha, President of Agilent's Diagnostics and Genomics Group; and Padraig McDonnell, President of Agilent CrossLab Group.
You will find the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations on our website.
Core revenue growth excludes the impact of currency and the acquisitions and divestitures completed within the past 12 months.
The Agilent team delivered another excellent quarter to close out an outstanding record-setting 2021.
At $6.32 billion for fiscal 2021, revenues are almost $1 billion higher than last year.
Full year core growth is up 15% on top of growing 1% last year.
The strength is broad-based for the three business units, all growing more than 10% core for the year.
Our full year operating margin was up 200 basis points.
Earnings per share are $4.34 or up 32%.
Let's now take a closer look at our strong finish to 2021 and review Q4 results.
Our momentum continues as orders increase faster than revenue in Q4.
And at the same time, we delivered our fourth straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth.
At $1.66 billion, revenues are up 12% on a reported basis.
Our core revenues grew 11%, exceeding our expectations.
This is on top of 6% core growth last year.
Our Q4 operating margin is 26.5%.
This is up 160 basis points from last year.
EPS is $1.21, up 23% year-over-year.
Our earnings growth also exceeded our expectations.
We continue to perform extremely well in Pharma, our largest market, growing 21%, driven by our Biopharma business.
Total pharma now represents 36% of our overall revenue.
This compared to 31% of our revenues just two years ago.
The strong growth in our Chemical and Energy business continues as we delivered 11% growth in the quarter.
This is on top of growing 3% in Q4 of last year.
PMI numbers are positive and we expect that chemical and energy will continue its strong growth trajectory into fiscal 2022.
In Diagnostics and Clinical, revenues grew 11% on top of growing 1% last year as testing volume started to recover.
On a geographic basis, our results are led by strong performance in the Americas and China.
Our business in the Americas grew 15% on top of 5% last year.
China grew 8% core on top of strong 13% growth in Q4 of last year.
China order growth outpaced revenue growth for the third quarter in a row.
Now, looking at a performance by business unit, the Life Sciences and Applied Markets Group generate revenue of $747 million.
LSAG is up 11% of both the reported and a core basis.
LSAG's growth is broad based and led by strength in liquid chromatography and cell analysis.
The Pharma and Chemical Energy markets were particularly strong for new instrument purchases.
Our cell analysis business crossed $100 million revenue mark in the quarter for the first time.
During the quarter, the LSAG team announced a new high mobility LC/Q-TOF and enhancements to our VWorks automation software suite.
These new well received offerings are used to improved analysis of proteins and peptides to speed development of new protein-based therapeutics.
The Agilent CrossLab Group posted revenue of $572 million.
This is up reported 10% and 9% core.
Growth is broad based, driven by strength in service contracts and on-demand services as well as our chemistries and supplies.
Our focus on increasing connect rates continues to pay off for us.
The strong expansion of our installed base in 2021 and increasing connect rates bodes well continued to strengthen our ACG business moving forward.
Our ability to drive growth and leverage our scale produce operating margins of roughly 30%, not more than 200 basis points from the prior year.
The Diagnostics and Genomics Group delivered revenue of $341 million, up 16% reported and up 13% core.
Our NASD oligo business led the way with robust double-digit growth in the quarter and achieved full year revenues exceeding $225 million.
We expect another year of strong double-digit growth as the team continues to do a great job of increasing throughput with existing capacity.
The expansion of our Train B oligo manufacturing facility in Frederick, Colorado is proceeding as planned.
We expect this additional capacity to come online by the end of calendar year 2022.
Moving on from our other business group updates, there are several other significant developments for Agilent this quarter.
We announced our commitment to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
We believe our approach delivers the same rigorous sustainability that'd be applied to everything else we do.
We also believe these actions are not only the right thing to do, but fundamental to achieving long-term success.
Our sustainable leadership continues to be primarily recognized as well.
You may have seen that Investor's Business Daily recently named Agilent to its Top 100 ESG Companies list.
We're also a company where diversity and inclusion represent a company priority and is a core element of our culture.
During the quarter, we achieved recognition by Forbes as one of the World's Best Employers and as a Best Workplace for Women.
While the Agilent team has a strong track record of delivering above-market growth and leading customer satisfaction, we're always looking to do more.
To further accelerate growth and strengthen our focus on customers, we are implementing a new One Agilent commercialization, combining for the first time all customer-facing activities under one leader.
The new organization brings together and strengthens our sales, marketing, digital channel and services team.
The new enterprise level commercialization is led by Padraig McDonnell.
Padraig will continue to lead the Agilent CrossLab Group as Business Group President as well as serves Agilent's first ever Chief Commercial Officer.
The way I'd like to characterize this move is to say we are doubling down on the success we've achieved with ACG, applying a holistic customer-focused approach to all aspects of our business.
We're also moving the chemistries and supplies division to LSAG.
This close organizational alignment between instrument and chemistries development will further accelerate our progress on instrument connect rates for chemistries and consumables.
We believe that structure of follow strategy and that this new organizational structure will further enhance our customer focus and the execution of our growth strategies.
Looking ahead to the coming year, we are in a strong position to continue to deliver on our build and buy growth strategy.
Agilent's business remains strong.
We enter the new year with a robust backlog and have multiple growth drivers, coupled with the proven execution excellence of the Agilent team.
A year ago to our Agilent Investor Day, we raised our long-term annual growth outlook to the 5% to 7% range, while reaffirming our commitment to annual operating margin improvement and double-digit earnings per share growth.
We are now one year in and well on our way to achieving these long-term goals.
Bob will provide more details, but for fiscal 2022, our initial full year guide calls for a core growth in the range of 5.5% to 7%.
We expect to continue our top line growth as we launch market-leading products and services, invest in fast-growing businesses and deliver outstanding customer service.
My confidence in the unstoppable One Agilent team and our ability to execute and deliver remains firmly intact.
This is our formula for delivering solid financial results, outstanding shareholder returns and continued strong growth.
We are very pleased with our performance in 2021 but not satisfied.
As I tell the Agilent team, the best is yet to come for our customers, our team and our shareholders.
I will now hand the call off to Bob.
In my remarks today, I'll provide some additional details on revenue and take you through the income statement and some other key financial metrics.
I'll then finish up with our initial outlook for the upcoming year and for the first quarter.
As Mike mentioned, we had very strong results in the fourth quarter.
Revenue was $1.66 billion, reflecting reported growth of 12%.
Core revenue growth at 11% was a point above our top end guidance range.
Currency accounted for 0.8% of growth, while M&A contributed half a point of growth during Q4.
And as expected, COVID-19-related revenues were roughly flat sequentially and resulted in just over a point headwind to the quarterly revenue growth.
Late in the quarter, we did see transit times that were in certain cases greater than anticipated, resulting in some revenues being deferred into Q1.
Our results were driven by a continuation of outstanding momentum in Pharma and in Biopharma in particular, while Chemical and Energy and Diagnostics and clinical also delivered strong results for us.
Our largest market, Pharma, grew 21% during the quarter against a tough compare of 12% last year.
The Small Molecule segment delivered mid-teens growth, while Large Molecule grew 30%.
Pharma was a standout all year, growing 24% for the full year after growing 6% in 2020.
And in FY '22, we expect our Pharma business to grow in the high-single digits.
Chemical and Energy continue to show strength growing 11% with instrument growth in the mid-teens during the quarter.
This impressive performance was against a 3% increase last year.
The C&E business grew 12% for the year after declining 3% in 2020.
Growth was driven by continued momentum in chemicals and engineered materials and we expect our C&E business to continue to grow solidly next year in the high-single digits.
Diagnostics and Clinical grew 11% with all three groups growing nicely during the quarter.
While the largest dollar contributor to this market is DGG, driven by our pathology-related businesses, the LSAG business continues to penetrate the clinical market and drive growth with strong performances by Cell Analysis and Mass Spec.
We saw mid-teens growth in the Americas and strong growth in China, albeit off a small base.
For the year, the Diagnostics and Clinical business grew 15% for the year after declining slightly by 1% in 2020.
And we expect to continue to grow in the mid to high-single digits in 2022.
Academia and Government, which can be lumpy and represents less than 10% of our business, was up 1% in Q4 versus a flat growth last year.
Most research labs continue to remain open globally and increase capacity to pre-pandemic levels.
China came in at low-single digits, while the Americas and Europe were roughly flat.
For the year, we grew 7% after declining 4% last year.
We expect this market will continue to improve slightly in fiscal year 2022 and expect growth of low to mid-single digits.
Food was flat during the quarter against a very tough 16% compare.
Europe and the Americas grew while China declined.
For the year, food grew 13% after growing 7% in 2020.
Looking forward, we expect food to return to historical growth rates in the low-single digits.
And rounding out the markets, Environmental and Forensics declined 2% in the fourth quarter off of 5% decline last year as growth in Environmental was overshadowed by a decline in Forensics.
For the year, we grew 5%, off a 2% decline in 2020.
And looking forward, like Food, we expect Environmental and Forensics to grow in the low-single digits in the coming year.
For Agilent overall, on a geographic basis, all regions again grew in Q4, led by Americas at 15% China grew 8% in Europe grew 4%.
And for the year, Americas led the way with 21% growth, followed by China at 13% and Europe at 12%.
Now let's turn to the rest of the P&L.
Fourth quarter gross margin was 55.9%, up 90 basis points from a year ago.
Gross margin performance, along with continued operating expense leverage, resulted in an operating margin for the fourth quarter of 26.5%, improving 160 basis points over last year.
Putting it all together, we delivered earnings per share of $1.21, up 23% versus last year.
And during the quarter, we benefited from some additional tax savings, resulting in a quarterly tax rate of 13% and our full year tax rate was 14.25%.
Our share count was 305 million shares as expected.
And for the year, earnings per share came in at $4.34, an increase of 32% from 2020.
We continued our strong cash flow generation, resulting in $441 million for the quarter, an increase of 17% versus last year.
For all of 2021, we generated almost $1.5 billion in operating cash and invested $188 million in capital expenditures.
During the quarter, we returned $195 million to our shareholders paying out $59 million in dividends and repurchasing roughly 830,000 shares for $136 million.
And for the year, we returned over $1 billion to shareholders in the forms of dividends and share repurchases.
And we ended the year with $1.5 billion in cash and $2.7 billion in outstanding debt and a net leverage ratio of 0.7 times.
All in all, a great end to an outstanding year.
Now let's move on to the outlook for fiscal 2022.
While we are still dealing with the pandemic and we have the additional challenges around logistics and inflationary pressures, we enter the year with strong backlog and momentum.
For the full year, we're expecting revenue to range between $6.65 billion and $6.73 billion, representing reported growth of 5% to 6.5% and core growth of 5.5% to 7%, consistent with our long-range goals.
And this incorporates absorbing roughly 0.5% headwind associated with COVID-related revenues with the majority of that impact coming in Q1.
We're expecting all three of our businesses to grow, led by DGG.
We expect DGG to grow high-single digits with the continued contribution of NASD in cancer diagnostics.
We expect ACG to grow at high-single digits with both services in our chemistries and supplies businesses growing comparably while LSAG is expected to grow in mid-single digits.
We expect operating margin expansion of 60 to 80 basis points for the year as we absorb the build-out costs of Train B at our Frederick, Colorado NASD site.
And in helping you build out your models, we're planning for a tax rate of 14.25%, consistent with current tax policies and $305 million fully diluted shares outstanding.
All this translates to a fiscal 2022 non-GAAP earnings per share expected to be between $4.76 to $4.86 per share, resulting in double-digit growth.
And finally, we expect operating cash flow of approximately $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion and capital expenditures of $300 million.
This capital investment represents an increase over 2021 as we continue our focus on growth, bringing our NASD Train B expansion online and expanding consumables manufacturing capacity for our Cell Analysis and Genomics businesses.
We have also announced raising our dividend by 8%, continuing an important streak of dividend increases and providing another source of value to our shareholders.
Now let's move on to our first quarter guidance.
But before I get into the specifics, some additional context.
Lunar New Year is February 1 this year, a shift from last year when it was in mid-February.
As a result, we expect some Q1 revenue to shift to the second quarter of this year as customers shut down ahead of the holiday.
In addition, as I mentioned, we do expect to see the largest impact of COVID-related revenue headwinds in the first quarter.
We estimate these two factors will impact our base business growth by 2 to 3 points and roughly equal in impact.
For Q1, we are expecting revenue to range from $1.64 billion to $1.66 billion, representing reported and core growth of 5.9% to 7.2%.
Adjusting for the timing of Lunar New Year and COVID-related headwinds, core growth would be roughly 8% to 10% in the quarter.
First quarter 2022 non-GAAP earnings are expected to be in the range of $1.16 to $1.18.
In conjunction with the new One Agilent commercial organization Mike talked about, we will be reporting under the new structure starting in Q1.
In addition, we'll be providing a recast of certain LSAG and ACG historical financials to account for the segment changes after the filing of our Annual Report on Form 10-K in December.
I am extremely proud of what the Agilent team achieved in 2021 and look forward to another strong performance in 2022.
With that for me, back to you for Q&A.
Bethany, if you could please provide instructions for the Q&A now.","q4 non-gaap earnings per share $1.21.
sees q1 revenue up 5.9 to 7.2 percent.
sees q1 revenue $1.64 billion to $1.66 billion.
sees fy revenue $6.65 billion to $6.73 billion.
q4 revenue rose 11 percent to $1.66 billion.
sees q1 non-gaap earnings per share $1.16 to $1.18.
fiscal year 2022 non-gaap earnings guidance of $4.76 to $4.86 per share."