ZimVie - Q2 2023

Transcript

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Good afternoon, welcome to ZimVie's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Currently, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question-and-answer session towards the end of today's call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Marissa Bych by Gilmartin Group for introductory disclosures.

Marissa Bych (Principal)

Thank you all for joining today's call. Earlier today, ZimVie released financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website, zimvie.com, as well as on sec.gov. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make comments during this call that include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the company's most recent periodic report filed with the SEC and subsequent SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties. In addition, the discussion on this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included within the earnings release and/or the investor deck issued today, found on the investor relations section of the company's website. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, August 2, 2023. ZimVie disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will turn the call over to Vafa Jamali, President and Chief Executive Officer of ZimVie.

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. In the second quarter, we continued to drive steady progress against our most vital objectives of innovation and commercial execution while taking deliberate steps to improve our operating profile. Our most critical imperative continues to be our innovation platform as we work to actively reshape our portfolio and lean further into the markets with the best long-term growth potential. On this note, we continued to build traction in the second quarter with our recently launched dental solutions, including our T3 PRO and TSX implants and the Encode Emergence healing abutment. We have been actively expanding the reach of these premium portfolio additions to markets around the globe. This includes the launch of T3 PRO and TSX in the Asia Pacific region, as well as the expansion of Encode Emergence into the European market.

We also continued to roll out new products with the addition of two new bone graft solutions, the RegenerOss CC Allograft Particulate and RegenerOss Bone Graft Plug. As we shared at the time of the launch, these two bone graft solutions broaden ZimVie's presence in the dental biomaterials market and expand our comprehensive suite of offerings. Our sales team and DSO partners are having success engaging existing and new customers on the heels of this cadence of launches, and we believe that the pace of adoption of our new-to-market products is outpacing growth in the overall market. Turning to other areas of progress in our dental portfolio, as we announced in April, we have now opened a state-of-the-art dental science, educational, and training institute at our Palm Beach Gardens dental facility.

It's been a great pleasure hosting current and prospective dental customers at the institute in recent months, and we have been receiving great feedback on the training we've hosted thus far. As of today, we've hosted 23 different courses with over 500 clinicians in a short span of roughly 12 weeks since opening. We anticipate hosting many additional events this year and ultimately hosting over 1,000 clinicians in 2023. In summary, I am pleased with our position in dental and remain confident in our ability to perform at or above market in our core product areas going forward. Turning to our spine business, we are also driving incremental success within the spine portfolio, with noteworthy success in our international markets. An accelerant for growth was OUS growth of Mobi-C.

I have been showcasing the importance of clinical evidence in our spine portfolio for the past 18 months. Mobi-C's truly differentiated clinical evidence dossier was rewarded here. Mobi-C received French government reimbursement and the highest quality rating from the British clinical panel, ODEP, early in the second quarter. These developments have helped drive strong European performance, which is particularly relevant as Europe's been historically underpenetrated and an under-adopted region for cervical disc replacements. Building on our spine presence outside the US, we are also excited to announce that we're continuing to expand our commercial efforts for The Tether, our differentiated non-fusion spinal device for the treatment of idiopathic scoliosis in key countries in both Europe and in Asia Pacific. Finally, we are advancing our Brainlab partnership.

As a reminder, in March, we announced a global development agreement with Brainlab for spine-enabling technologies to provide our customers and patients the deepest level of integration between ZimVie products and Brainlab's industry-leading portfolio of spine imaging, planning, navigation, and robotic-assisted solutions. Today, we continue to work on achieving compatibility between our spinal implant and Brainlab's spine and trauma navigation systems, allowing us to enhance workflow and accuracy in the operating room while reducing intraoperative X-rays and radiation exposure. We are now collaborating much more deliberately at the customer level, and I look forward to sharing some customer successes in coming quarters with you. Looking forward, we will continue to engage with our key surgeon customers, innovate on and around our existing solutions, and ultimately optimize our position in markets we're positioned to win.

Turning to our continued operational improvement, I'm excited to announce that we have now completed all TSAs related to the separation from our former parent, Zimmer Biomet. In these transition agreements with the parent, we refreshed our core IT systems, moving over 950 servers to data centers and transitioning over 200 applications to modern and largely cloud-based platforms. We are also finalizing the ERP conversions, with our last conversion in Barcelona, set to finalize this fall. In addition, we've made meaningful reductions to our physical footprint, receivables, and corporate overhead. We have more work to do surrounding optimizing inventory levels and optimizing manufacturing output. These actions are in accordance with plan we laid out at the time of the spin and are included in our 2023 financial guidance. I'll now turn the call over to Rich to outline our financial performance.

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Thanks, Vafa, good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin by reviewing our second quarter of 2023 results, and we'll close by providing our updated outlook for the full year 2023. Total third-party net sales for the second quarter of 2023 were $224.9 million, a decrease of 3.6% on a reported basis and a decrease of 3.4% in constant currency. Moving on to our two segments. Global Dental's third-party net sales were $118.7 million in the second quarter, representing 40 basis points of growth in both reported and constant currency when compared to the prior year period. Although the dental market as a whole was relatively soft in the second quarter, solid commercial execution and the continued market acceptance of our new implants position us very well for the longer term.

Additionally, we continue to see strength in our digital offerings, which grew high single digits in Q2 versus the prior year period. In the U.S., dental third-party net sales of $69.3 million declined slightly by 1.3%, driven by a slightly weaker implant market, offset by strength in our digital solutions sales. Outside of the U.S., dental third-party net sales of $49.4 million increased by 2.9% on a reported basis and 2.8% in constant currency, driven by growth across all three of our product families: implants, biomaterials, and digital. In particular, we are pleased to see strong market acceptance of our T3 PRO and TSX implant launches.

Second quarter Global Spine third-party net sales were $106.2 million, a decrease of 7.8% on a reported basis, and a 7.2% decrease in constant currency when compared to the prior year period. The decrease was primarily driven by continued competition in the spine market and our decision to exit China following volume-based procurement, offset by sales that were previously attributed to Zimmer Biomet. As Vafa intimated, we are pleased with our Mobi-C and Tether performance relative to the balance of our core spine portfolio, led by growth in Europe. In the US, spine third-party net sales of $84.5 million decreased by 9%, driven by competitive pressure in core spine, partially offset by a relative improvement in Mobi-C and Tether.

Outside of the US, spine third-party net sales of $21.7 million decreased by 2.9% on a reported basis, but grew 10 basis points in constant currency. The impact of our decision to exit China is estimated to be $2.7 million versus prior year and is offset by $3.8 million of sales previously recognized by Zimmer Biomet that are now in ZIMV sales. Second quarter adjusted gross profit of $151.4 million compared to $153.4 million in the prior year period. Adjusted gross margin of 67.3% reflects an increase of 160 basis points when compared to 65.7% in Q2 of 2022.

The increase in gross margin versus prior year is driven by a further reduction of inventory charges in our Spine segment, resulting from our operational initiatives to better manage inventory, partially offset by higher cost of products sold in our Dental segment due to product mix. Adjusted research and development expense of $11.5 million was 5.1% as a percentage of third-party net sales. Second quarter 2023 adjusted selling general administrative expenses of $125.6 million or 55.8% of third-party net sales was 250 basis points higher than the prior year period. This increase was due to lower net sales, higher marketing and medical education-related expenses, and year-over-year differences in our corporate expense structure.

Note that this time last year, ZIMV was a newly spun company, and we were still building our infrastructure as a newly independent company. Adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of 2023 was $29.7 million or 13.2% of third-party net sales and reflects a modest decline of 20 basis points from 13.4% in the prior year period. The decrease in adjusted EBITDA margin is primarily due to lower net sales and higher selling general administrative costs, as previously discussed, offset by higher gross margin. Adjusted earnings per share in the second quarter was $0.17 on a fully diluted weighted average share count of 26.3 million shares.

Touching on working capital, liquidity, and debt, in Q2, we continued to make progress on our initiatives to capitalize on the strength of assets on our balance sheet and the application of our disciplined financial framework. We have much work to do in these areas, but have seen a reduction in inventory-related charges in the first half of the year that have manifested themselves in a higher gross margin, and we have reduced net inventory by $6.3 million since December of 2022. Well-funded assets on our balance sheet have allowed us to further reduce capital spending by $7.1 million year-over-year. We ended the second quarter with $66.2 million in cash and equivalents, roughly flat to Q1. As a reminder, our $175 million credit facility revolver remains undrawn.

I'll now turn to our revised full year 2023 outlook. We are pleased with our progress we are making and are subsequently revising our full year 2023 financial outlook. Starting with revenue, we are revising our expected full year 2023 net sales to be in the range of $850 million-$870 million, up from our previous guidance range of $835 million-$860 million. Looking at our segments, we continue to expect 2023 dental net sales to be flat or to grow in the low single digits versus 2022.

We now expect 2023 spine net sales to decline in the high single digits to low double digits relative to 2022, inclusive of an approximately 3% point negative impact from our decision to exit the China market. To provide some additional transparency into our third quarter revenue expectations, we are expecting a more pronounced impact from seasonality during the summer months versus historical periods. As of today, we expect net sales to be sequentially lower in the third quarter, down low double digits versus our second quarter, with dental roughly flat year-over-year, reflecting this historical seasonality. Moving to adjusted EBITDA margin. We expect full year adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the range of 13.5%-14% of net sales, the same as previously guided.

We are pleased with our year-to-date 2023 financial performance, we'll continue to uncover and execute on opportunities to optimize our income statement and balance sheet. For Q3, we expect EBITDA margins to be sequentially down versus Q2, commensurate with the impact of seasonality on our Q3 revenue, as just mentioned. Consistent with our raising of revenue expectations and year-to-date earnings per share performance, we are revising our adjusted earnings per share guidance range to $0.50 per share and $0.70 per share on a fully diluted share count of 26.5 million shares, increasing the bottom and top end of our previous guidance range of $0.40-$0.60 per share. With that, I'll now turn the call back over to Vafa.

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Thank you, Rich. I'm pleased with our progress in 2023 to date, as well as our execution on streamlining objectives. Although we've had additional work ahead to return our business to durable growth, I'm confident in the strength of the assets in our portfolio and our presence in underserved end markets, which ultimately bring great value to patients. As we continue to improve the efficiency of our teams, evolve our product platforms, and execute commercially, we look forward to showcasing the results that this work will deliver in the back half of the year and beyond. With that, we'll open it up to questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Today's first question comes from the line of Robbie Marcus from JP Morgan. Please proceed.

Robbie Marcus (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Oh, great. thanks for taking the questions and congrats on a nice quarter. Maybe to start-

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Thanks, Robert.

Robbie Marcus (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

It looks like a lot of the outperformance, at least versus my forecast, came from outside the US dental and particularly outside the US, or I mean, outside the US dental and outside the US spine, rather than the US, which was roughly in line. Maybe speak to some of the trends you're seeing outside the US. What's driving the outsized growth there versus estimates? How should we think about those two line items as we move through the rest of the year and into next year?

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Hey, Robbie. Good afternoon. Good to talk to you again. This is Rich Heppenstall. I'll start with dental, and then I'll kind of round it out with spine, on from an OUS perspective. On the dental side, we actually saw pretty good growth in our EMEA region. And it was pretty strong growth versus kind of our internal expectations. And we grew actually all three of our major product categories very nicely in that particular region, including our biomaterials offerings, our digital solutions, and then also implant screws. You know, we saw some fundamental recovery in Europe across, you know, many of our geographies that we serve in Europe on the dental side. We're pleased with that performance.

On the spine side of things, you know, the way that pardon me. There was an announcement that was made a few weeks ago regarding the French reimbursement of Mobi-C in that particular country. We're the only cervical disc device in France that is actually reimbursed by the government. We're actually getting a lot of traction from Mobi-C growth, particularly in France, and it's starting to permeate through the rest of Europe. Our Mobi-C growth in Europe is actually accelerating. Secondarily, Tether is also, as we geographically expand to multiple geographies, is also growing really nicely in Europe. You know, we're seeing some foundational strength, particularly in our core products in EMEA. That's really, that's really an uplift on the spine side.

Robbie Marcus (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Really helpful. You know, again, a good EBITDA in the quarter, showing upward improvement. You talked about some of the trends there, but as we, as some of these improvements you're, you're planning to make on inventory and continued improvement in sales, you know, how should we think about your, your target for EBITDA expansion as we move forward? I know you're not guiding for 2024 now, but how should we think about your, your near to midterm ability to expand EBITDA margins and your confidence in that ability? Thanks a lot.

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Yeah, no problem. At the end of, at the end of our last earnings call in Q1, we did announce a, a restructuring. We, we announced a benefit in 2023 that will also carry itself forward into 2024. We, we expect to start to see, you know, the, the real benefits of that restructuring announcement, you know, probably, you know, the latter, latter few months of, of this year. A lot of it is kind of back-end loaded, particularly where, where we made some of the changes in, in some of the particular geographies. On the first hand, we think there's an annualized benefit relative to that restructuring that'll carry forward its into 2024.

Secondarily, you'll see in Q2 that we actually expanded margin again in Q2, despite, you know, a little bit of a headwind around product mix within the dental business. The reason for that is we have implemented purchasing controls on the spine side that is really limiting the amount of excess and obsolete inventory charges that we're taking. We expect to be able to continue that effort and be able to continue to expand margins despite kind of what's going on on the top line. Obviously, you know, we're encouraged by the strength of Mobi-C and Tether OUS and our dental business OUS as a baseline as we exit the year.

Robbie Marcus (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. appreciate it. Thanks for taking the questions.

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Of course.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Miksic from Barclays. Please proceed.

Matt Miksic (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, thanks so much for taking the question. I just wanted to follow up on, on some, some of the trends that you talked about, Vafa. In particular, you know, the competitive, you know, the competitive and kind of market trends that you talked about in spine. Can you maybe give some color as to, you know, what are, what are driving the, the pressure points for you, if, if that's the right way to describe it in terms of competition? What types of things are you seeing in the organization that might give us some, some, some sense that things could stabilize, you know, in a quarter, in, in two quarters, in three quarters, just on the spine side? Then I have one quick follow-up.

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Sure. Hey, Matt. Really on the, on the spine side, we, we really decided that, that we had to invest more seriously, more heavily in our, our platforms. This is both the core spine, which is the, arguably, the most competitive part of spine, and also, not forgetting Mobi-C and Tether, which is our, our, our most differentiated assets. Overall, as we, as we looked at where were the areas where we get the biggest impact, that's the places where we spent the, we spent the energy, the resources. And I do think that that space is very, very competitive, but I do think that we are addressing the areas of concern. One was, you know, enabling technologies and how we compete there against others that, that have enabling technologies.

With Brainlab, I think we're really secure in a good place there with a very, very state-of-the-art technology platform added to our devices, which I think are gonna be a really, really great match. That's an area that we addressed there. With Mobi-C, you know, we of course, we've had some success in Europe launching it. With Tether, we've had success in Europe and Asia Pac, with great, great new users and really successful procedures. We've also reinvigorated those portfolios. Look at us continuing to build on that and what, what do we bring out to the market to re-energize the US market, which is obviously the biggest market there.

We're doing a lot of reimbursement work and a lot of R&D work that's gonna really satisfy and fortify those technologies. It's a competitive space. I think we've got a really, really good opportunity to continue to differentiate and get back some business. We had some gaps in the core area that we're filling right now.

... which are really, really critical. I, I, I also look at, you know, using some of the disruption in the spine world, to our benefit as well, frankly, for, for the balance of this year and into next. Those are the areas that I'd be focused on for spine to get it to ultimately to growth.

Matt Miksic (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. That's helpful. And then just on the dental side, and I apologize if this was covered, I was kind of hopping back and forth between some other calls. There's a lot of folks, so I think this evening. Just, just one of the, one of the concerns is you are -- and everyone's aware that, that it, that there may be some, you know, pending pressure, consumer-driven pressure on the, on the dental side of the business. You know, ironically, you know, when, when, when recession periods were higher, you know, things, things seemed to be kind of moving better, and it seems like maybe things are slowing a little bit.

Do you think, you know, any, any color as to whether that has anything to do with like the, you know, the consumers- consumer market generally, or is this a, just a comp issue? Or, you know, any color that you're picking up on the field, you know, related to the demand for implants and the sustainability of, of, you know, of growth in that key segment?

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Right. Right now, we believe we're outperforming the market for premium premium implants. That is definitely the case. We are, we are gaining more customers, and we're filling our training programs, and we are in servicing around the clock. I do believe that we have new users coming on board. Regarding the market as a whole, I think it's for sure, softer than it was a few quarters ago, but I do believe that that's very temporary. As long as we can hold up here and not lose customers and continue to, to kind of bring on new customers, I think we're in pretty good shape.

As far as the market market's concerned, I think ZimVie's premium implants are doing quite well on the back of both the innovation that we've done, which has had really good uptake in the market, and on the back of just a of a really solid digital dentistry platform that allows users to onboard pretty quickly and to become implantologists with relative certainty that they could perform the tasks the tasks at hand. Overall, I'm feeling okay. We've been watching for a slowdown, and so far, again, our numbers would say it's, it's, the, the volume per unit is, per, per user is probably, you know, not, not anywhere near the, the, the peak. So far, we're, we're doing okay relative to our competitors.

Rich Heppenstall (EVP, CFO, and Treasurer)

Yeah, Matt, Matt, just to add to that, this is Rich. Just, just to quickly comment, you know, one of, one of our kind of fundamental strength, I think, is, has really been around kind of our commercial execution and focus. As you mentioned, in Q2 last year was a relatively tough compare for the dental business. You know, we, we grew 40 basis points and implants did not go backwards. You know, which we think is outpacing the market, generally speaking.

Matt Miksic (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah, that's helpful. Just maybe, just the same topic, if I, just one quick follow-up to that topic is obviously, you know, a lot... There, there was a number of consumer segments, right, that, that sort of benefited from, you know, cash in people's pockets and so on, coming out of the pandemic. I, I don't know if this was one of them, but, you know, is that, is that your perception? And, you know, last year, this quarter was a tough comp. Is, is it just a matter of working-- Is, is part of it, you know, working some of that out of the market, sort of whatever that was, buying ahead, you know, strong demand, say, a year, year and a half ago, and then getting on the other side of that?

I understand you're executing well against the market, which is great, but just as a market dynamic, do you think that's one of the factors, or is that not really so much something to think about for implants?

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Yeah, I think that bolus came Q1 of last year and Q2 of last year, where, where we really saw robust demand. We, we, we, we really saw that. That was, that was terrific, and I think that was kind of the, the fundamentally what, what you're referring to. What should make us really confident is that we beat both of those quarters this year. That, that on itself lends me to believe that, you know, we've built a, a platform, and we haven't gone backwards on it. I think that probably indicates some, some share pickup on, on our part. I do think that those were boomer quarters probably because of some cash in pocket, but we haven't gone backwards from those.

Matt Miksic (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. Appreciate the color.

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Thanks for the questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. That now concludes the Q&A portion. I will now hand the line back over to Vafa Jamali for closing remarks.

Vafa Jamali (Chairman, President and CEO)

Thank you very much. Again, we look forward to continuously improving the performance of this business, and we really appreciate the questions and your attention. Bye for now.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.