Becton, Dickinson and Company (NYSE:BDX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And of course, in MMS, what we’ve built now with a $700 million pharmacy robotics business. Really, if you look across med tech, it’s hard to name many automation or robotics businesses larger than our franchise that we’ve now built there in the pharmacy. And that’s growing strong double digits. We expect that could continue through ’24. And obviously, the return of Alaris has been our number one goal here for a couple of years, and we couldn’t be more pleased to achieve that goal at the end of ’23, and that gives us another talent and confidence in our long-term plan and our confidence in this year. So a lot of really good things happening. As we think about M&A, you did ask that question. As Chris also mentioned, we ended ’23 at strong leverage, 2.6 times leverage, strong – strong cash flow, increasingly strong cash flow as we go into ’24.

And so we have a strong, robust M&A pipeline. We’re still focused on larger-sized tuck-in M&A, which is still our priority, as we’ve shared, and we’re not changing from that. We’re going to continue to be very disciplined on the targets that we go after as we have been to make sure that they drive accretive growth and profitability for the company, and we see a number of opportunities to do that. And so – and I think you – we’re really pleased with how we’ve executed on the M&A that we’ve done. We’re really pleased with the track record that we’ve built there. You can see, as Chris shared, 40 basis points of underlying organic growth driven through the acquisitions that we’ve done over the last couple of years. And that’s a lever we’re going to continue to pull in a very systematic way.

And I think you’re seeing all the other actions that we’re taking, including optimizing cash flow fit into that growth algorithm. So thank you for the question.

Matt Miksic: Appreciate the color.

Operator: Thank you. All right. This does conclude the question-and-answer portion of our call. So I would like to turn the floor back over to the speakers for any closing or additional remarks.

Tom Polen: Thank you, operator, and thanks, everyone, for your time today. I’d like to take a moment and again, thank our global team of BD Associates who are advancing our strategy and who are making meaningful impacts for our customers and the patients we mutually serve. Our BD 2025 strategy is demonstrating strong momentum. We’re exceeding our commitments and have outlined a strong outlook for fiscal 2024. We look forward to connecting with everyone again on our next call, and thank you very much, and have a great rest of the day.

Operator: Thank you. This does conclude the audio webcast. On behalf of BD, thank you for joining today. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.+