ICU Medical, Inc. (NASDAQ:ICUI) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew Mishan : I wanted to ask a 2-piece on the guidance. First, I guess, just the midpoint of the guidance comes down by about $10 million. Is that just simply the vascular assets piece, the $25 million at a decent contribution margin on kind of bringing that down? And then the second piece that I also wanted to ask was what had happened this year that could have enabled you to get to the higher end of your guidance.

Vivek Jain: It’s a great question, Matt. On the first part, yes, you’re generally directionally right on that, right? This contribution margin maybe isn’t quite as robust as every piece of the infusion consumables market, but it’s still pretty good. So it makes a difference. And that was important if we wanted to be at the high end. Two, as Brian said in his prepared remarks, this notion of getting everything perfect on inventory production and demand has been challenging. And so even if we feel okay about the aggregate gross margin, I think it’s on our minds that it’s been hard to predict everything perfectly, right? And then we always, I think, believed to get all the way to the high end also is everything on the macro had to work right, currency, broader supply chain costs, et cetera.

And some of the currencies, particularly what’s going on in the peso and Costa Rica and Colonias hurts a little bit, right? So there’s some headwinds coming there. I think it’s more of the macro than the stuff we operationally planned for.

Matthew Mishan: Okay. I think that’s fair. And that’s –

A –Vivek Jain: And it was both reasons we gave a wide range, right? We had that conversation at the time. And I remember we had a [Indiscernible], what has to do to get all the way there. So everything has to go right, and the macro has to go, has to go right.

Q –Matthew Mishan : And then there’s still a lot that’s still left to do as long as integration goes. I was just hoping you could help us with like the time line of the ERP integration because it does seem as if you need to get that piece finished or at least further along before you get to that next wave of synergies like footprint and kind of supply chain.

A –Vivek Jain: Brian, do you want to do that one, Brian or?

A –Brian Bonnell: Yes. I mean the IT integration is a multiyear project that we are starting to work on but it’s not something that happens necessarily quickly. I would say, Matt, that as it relates to synergies, you don’t have to wait until all that work is 100% complete in order to see some of the benefits. So there are some things that we can – where we – there is some areas where we can reduce cost as we’re doing the IT integration, and there’s other things that aren’t necessarily predicated upon that work in order to see the benefits.

Vivek Jain: In the case of the Pfizer transaction, we were under a shot clock where Pfizer was no longer going to provide us systems, and we had to make all of those moves in 18 months, which I think it ultimately took 21 months-or-something to get off. Here, we’re kind of in month ‘18, and we’re starting the journey of the first action was to separate and specifically where the ERP just give some examples of where it is very valuable, is things like what’s our long-term warehousing and distribution model where we have our service repair model, we have a lot of duplication not only domestically, but around the planet. And when you have everything on a common order to cash infrastructure, you can kind of deal with some of those things in an easier fashion, to Brian’s point, you don’t have to have it, but it just makes it easier operationally.