Danaher Corporation (NYSE:DHR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew McGrew: I’d love to say that it’s easy to do, but there’s quite a bit of work to get through it, Scott. I mean we’ve got — we’re still in the early days of the audits, getting the audits done. And after that, we’ve got a lot of org work, obviously, to do and a whole work stream of people who are working on it. I think we are still very much on track for Q4, the ability to do something here in Q4. Anything earlier, I think just between the audits, the work that remains and the tax ruling, it just takes time for these. So I don’t think that’s probably a base case scenario for us right now, Scott. I still think Q4 is the way to think about it.

Scott Davis: Okay. I’ll pass it on. Thank you, guys and best of luck in ’23.

Operator: Our next question comes from Dan Brennan with Cowen.

Dan Brennan: Great. Good morning, Rainer, good morning, Matt. Thanks for taking my questions here. Maybe first one would just be on China. I know there was a question asked earlier, but just wondering, some peers have commented that obviously, there’s a headwind right now as the COVID rates have spiked but that as the year plays out, you could see China actually turned out to be stronger than maybe you were — than peers were anticipating, excuse me, given the benefits on the economy. So kind of what are you assuming in that low single? Is that — do you think you need some cushion in there? Or just how do you contemplate China playing out for the year given the change of policy?

Rainer Blair: Dan, so — I mean, the near term, just to recap is, in fact, that we saw, particularly in our Diagnostics business, lower patient volumes related to the hospitals in China being overwhelmed with COVID-infected patients. And we expect that to continue here in the Q1. It’s currently the Lunar New Year holiday, where we expect infections to spread here in the next 30 days or so. And then over time, that, that would start waning, reducing. With — it’s kind of unknown as to how many other waves follow that. But we do believe that during the course of the year, especially as it relates to our business, patient volumes start recovering. We’ve seen this again and again after severe lockdowns of large cities in the previous years.

And so we expect that to be pretty resilient. And that’s why we end up then with a full year China guide of low single digits. Now could there be upside? Potentially. There’s clearly some pent-up demand in the Chinese economy. And it just depends now on how quickly people can get back to work and some normalcy returns to the markets in general. So we think from where we sit today, low single digits for the full year is a good way to think about it. And of course, we’ll continue to update as we go through the year here. But it’s a good starting point, and there may be some upside should in fact that pent-up demand be released here in 2023.

Dan Brennan: Great. And then just on the M&A environment. We’ve heard some commentary in kind of recent weeks that there seems to be a more willing seller environment, maybe just a reflection of macro and interest rates. So there seems to be maybe more folks coming to the table. How would you characterize obviously, it’s impossible to time M&A, but how would you characterize the current environment? And just any color in terms of the outlook, whether it be from private targets or public targets and obviously, I’m sure all the remaining businesses post the EAS spin, EAS and excuse me, are candidates for M&A, but just how would you characterize kind of the interest levels by your business? Thank you.