Smith & Nephew Management Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to today's speakers, Mr. Olivier Bohuon, and Mr. Adrian Hennah. Please go ahead, sir.

Olivier Bohuon

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm Olivier Bohuon, I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Smith & Nephew, and welcome to our first quarter results call. I will cover the highlights and then hand over to Adrian Hennah, our CFO, to take you through the numbers. Whenever Adrian is finished, I will update you on the progress we are making to reshape Smith & Nephew to deliver against our strategic priority. And as usual, we'll take questions at the end.

Smith & Nephew has had a good first quarter of 2012, building on our achievements in Q4 last year. We saw the first results of our actions to make Smith & Nephew more fit and more effective. We grew revenue, increased profits and improved our trading profit margin. We continued investing and maintain our high rate of product launches, while implementing the necessary efficiency programs. Our Q1 revenues were up an underlying 3% to $1,079 billion. This was in line with our expectations.

Trading profit increased 5% to $252 million, giving a 50-basis points improvement in our trading profit margin to 23.3%. This reflects the initial results of restructuring improvements we are making, as well as the benefits of the phasing of some costs from Q1 into Q2, and Adrian will talk more about this. Adjusted earnings per share were $0.195, an increase of 6% on last year's $0.184. We continue to generate good cash flow, and our net debt was $28 million at the end of the quarter, down from $351 million last year.

This slide shows our underlying growth in the quarter. It's a complex slide, but I will try to explain it, on the left-hand side, geographically, and on the right, by product franchise. There's a lot of information, but it provides a single snapshot of the quarter. Looking at the left-hand side, we are now analyzing our geographic revenues between the established market, i.e., U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and in the other hand, our emerging and international markets. This is consistent with 2 of our 5 strategic priorities, which will allow you to understand better and track our progress over the coming years.

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