Smith & Nephew plc (NYSE:SNN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sebastien Jantet: All right. Thanks for taking my questions. Sebastien Jantet from Liberum. Two questions. One around overall kind of what the midterm revenue guidance. Can you give us a sense of the price assumptions that you baked into that revenue guidance across the kind of board? And then secondly, still on the revenue guidance. You talked about exiting some low-return markets. Are those — should we think of those as being material in terms of revenues? Or should we think of the gross revenue being higher than the 5%?

Deepak Nath: Yes. We expect — I mean, there’s a mix of price and volume. Historically, we’ve seen price deflation in our business to the tune of 1% or 2% historically. We see slightly better than that here. Obviously, here in the immediate past, we’ve been able to pass through some of our price increases. We’ve called that out, of course, in previous quarters. And that is quite a contrast to how the med tech business typically operates. Going forward, we expect to continue to try and pass through the exceptional price increases that we’ve seen that honestly is a once-in-a-generation type increases. But in the end, in terms of revenue growth, it’s going to have to come, as I said, from mix and volume and continued performance relative from a share standpoint.

That’s ultimately what’s going to drive growth. So that’s the first point to that. The second point that I’d like to call out is from a midterm revenue growth perspective, we see again all of the franchises contributing to that growth over the midterm. Orthopaedics is where we need to kind of bring that level of revenue growth in line with markets. So there’s an implied share recapture in the numbers that we’ve guided to. So the numbers that we’ve said about 5% to 6% for the year and 5-plus percent beyond taking into account all of these factors is the net of all of the things that you see price, volume, share, cash, all of the pack.

Unknown Analyst: Hi. from HSBC. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, please. First of all, on CORI, I know you don’t like to announce installed base, but I know you closely follow the installed base as well as the KPIs. So some color on that would be great. And second, on the waterfall chart on orthopaedics, that was a powerful chart. Thanks for showing that. I would guess it would look different in the other two segments, Sports Medicine and AWM, but how would it look if you were to put it out? And do you see similar risks such as what we’ve seen in Orthopaedics and VBP in other segments? And the — this one is for Francoise. In light of the increase in leverage and continued interest in M&A. Do you — how do you see the capital policy should we continue to assume the $250 million to $300 million buyback as well as yes, that line of dividends going forward.

Deepak Nath: Okay. Let me address those. On CORI, the last number that we reported is 500 plus. In terms of our installed base, we expect to place more than 300 units in 2023. Most of 2022, we’re in a very supply-constrained situation, as I mentioned earlier, that really paced our ability to place CORI, and not that they’ll be completely out of the woods from a supply standpoint in 2023, but we expect to place over 300 in ’23. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of a calibration. That’s how we think about it. What we look at internally isn’t just placements. It’s the quality of those placements, where we’re putting them, what kind of utilization we get from them and are we advancing our commercial objectives in terms of how we introduce and get CORI adopted into the market.