Q4 2023 Bioventus Inc Earnings Call

Participants

Dave Crawford; VP, IR & Treasurer; Bioventus Inc

Robert Claypoole; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Bioventus Inc

Mark Singleton; Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President, Principal Accounting Officer; Bioventus LLC

Chase Knickerbocker; Analyst; Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Caitlin Cronin; Analyst; Canaccord Genuity LLC

Presentation

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Bioventus, Inc. fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question. You may press star, then one on the touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dave Crawford, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Dave Crawford

Thanks, Betsy, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Bioventus 2023 fourth quarter earnings conference call. With me this morning are Rob Claypoole, CEO; and Mark Singleton, Senior Vice President and CFO. Rob will begin his remarks with his initial impressions and learnings since joining SCEO. and then lay out our priorities for 2024. Mark will provide detail of our fourth quarter and full year results and outline our 2024 financial guidance. We will finish the call with Q&A and the presentation for today's call is available in the Investors section of our website at Bioventus.com.
Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that our remarks today contain forward-looking statements that are based on the current expectations of management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated, including the risks and uncertainties described in the Company's filings with the SEC, including Item 1A, Risk Factors of the Company's Form 10 K for the year ended December 31st, 2023. And as such, factors may be updated from time to time in the company's other filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made, Although it may voluntarily do so from time to time, the company undertakes no commitment to update or revise the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.
This call will also include references to certain financial measures that are not calculated in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. We generally refer to these as non-GAAP or adjusted financial measures important disclosures about definitions and reconciliations of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP are available in the earnings press release on the Investors section of our website at Bioventus.com.
Now I will turn the call over to Rob.

Robert Claypoole

Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for your continued interest in by Ventas. I'm honored to be part of the Bioventus team and lead an outstanding company focused on helping patients recover and lead active lives.
I'd like to start by thanking Tony Bill for his leadership in spearheading bio Ventas's progress in overcoming significant challenges and setting a foundation upon which we can build. And Tony and I have had an exceptionally smooth that it is a world-class transition, and I'm grateful to him for the as Dave mentioned, and I'd like to first share my impressions and early learnings from my first two months of CDO. and then discuss our top priorities for 2024. Over the past two months, I've had the opportunity to meet with many team members from around the globe at our different locations participate in each of our national sales meetings and the customers in person for our surgical HA and Exogen businesses and engage in one-on-one conversations with key opinion leaders and patients virtually for P. and S. and rehab.
And with each meeting of listen, Frode and learned first hand about our current position in the market, our challenges and the future potential of our diverse business, and it's an early in-depth engagement with our employees and customers has provided me with the following perspective, Bioventus is well positioned in large market segments with excellent technology and a talented team who is eager to accelerate the company's growth and profitability across each of our businesses. I'm not sure in this perspective with you casually or loosely I've had the privilege of leading various therapeutic categories within medtech with several leading companies over the past 20 years. And this experience has provided me with a strong foundation to evaluate the opportunities for Bioventus.
Consider this, we hold a leadership position across roughly two thirds of our product portfolio, while in the remaining one-third of our portfolio, we are growing faster than the market, and we are in markets with favorable demographic tailwinds enabling sustained growth. In addition, we've started to improve our business processes, and we built momentum throughout 2023 as we exceeded our financial objectives. I will tell you all about that in a few minutes.
This combination of healthy market dynamics, progress with our business fundamentals and exceeding our objectives is providing our team with the energy and the confidence to further advance our business.
So with all this in mind, when I decided to join the company, it was because of bio Ventas's, diverse market-leading portfolio and the prospect to create significant shareholder value. And I feel even stronger about the potential about Ventas today than I did two months ago. And there are so many challenges for us to tackle, but we will approach it every day with a continuous improvement mindset, and we cannot wait to show everyone what Bioventus can and will achieve our I please allow me to transition and highlight the three areas we will prioritize in 2020 for, first, accelerating our revenue growth, second, improving our operational efficiency and boosting our future profitability, and third, improving our cash flow and liquidity position.
Let me provide further context on these three areas. First, as we have discussed in the past 2024 will be the 2nd year of our planned turnaround with a focus on accelerating revenue growth across our business, fueled by increasing growth across our HA and Surgical Solutions businesses, along with continued above market growth in our international segments. Across each business, we are going to focus on improving our basic commercial fundamentals to drive stronger execution. With respect to our HA business, we expect volume growth to remain above market as we leverage the clinical differentiation of Darling, along with the shift from multiple injection therapy to single-injection therapy. And we expect that our strong volume growth, combined with improving price dynamics will accelerate revenue as the headwinds from the past year and a half subside throughout the year.
Regarding surgical solutions, we see growth accelerating for this business as well. We expect the market-leading technology of our ultrasonics platform to continue to produce double digit growth. Meanwhile, the work done by the team to strengthen our bone graft substitutes business enabled us to return to above-market growth in the fourth quarter, which we expect to maintain in 2024. And we have a tremendous opportunity to build our international business with expected strong double digit growth. So overall, our financial plan calls for a meaningful increase in our revenue growth compared to the last two years.
Second focus area improving our operational efficiency and boosting our future profitability through better prioritization, greater organizational efficiency and reductions in our operational expenditures. Regarding prioritization with many different growth opportunities in front of us, it's important for us to be very disciplined in prioritizing and funding initiatives that deliver sustainable value to our shareholders. Over the past two months, we've made progress with driving more disciplined, strategic focus and reducing our top business priorities now and start to reallocate our resources to maximize the return on our investments.
With respect to organizational efficiency, we're a diverse company that has evolved through several acquisitions. And while our organization demonstrates fantastic teamwork daily, it's clear we have a significant opportunity to better integrate our business processes across functions and locations to streamline our work and drive speed so that it's easier for our customers to do business with us and so that we can devote more of our energy to generating profitable growth with this in mind improving our organizational efficiency is a key priority. And regarding our operational expenditures and the team captured material savings last year, and we'll continue to examine areas where we can reduce our expenses to either invest in more productive initiatives or to drop these savings to our bottom line to accelerate our margin expansion.
As mentioned, our third major focus area is improving our cash flow and liquidity position as you're driving improved cash flow as a metric, my leadership team and I have as part of our incentive compensation, we expect to see a material change in our operating cash flow this year by lowering costs related to our acquisition integrations and debt restructuring. We also plan to drive a reduction in inventories in the second half of the year to further augment our cash flow.
With respect to our liquidity position, we reduced our leverage over this past year by more than a full turn of EBITDA but it remains above our target range. An amendment to our term loan was an important step in providing flexibility through next year. Our improved cash generation enables us to reduce our debt throughout the year with the expectation that our leverage is below four turns by year end.
All right. That concludes my remarks about my initial impressions at our priorities for the year. Before turning it over to Mark, let me just add and I'm going to dive deeper into our financials. Let me just say again how excited I am to be leading Bioventus. While significant work remains, I'm encouraged by our ability to address last year's headwinds and improve our financial results and liquidity. And now over the coming quarters, we will focus on steadily improving our business fundamentals and our performance as we work to build your confidence. And Bioventus, I'll turn the call over to Mark.

Mark Singleton

Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Let me start by saying I am proud of our entire organization for the significant improvement across our commercial business and functions. Not only have we solidified our financial position by driving a sizable growth in our adjusted EBITDA through a reduction in our cost structure, which enabled us to remove our going concern disclosure. We have delivered enhancements to our internal control environment and remediating our material weaknesses. Traditionally, the visibility into our business and coordination across our teams has significantly advanced, enabling us to have confidence as we execute our financial plan for 2020. For moving forward, we must consistently approach our business with a continuous improvement mindset to drive further efficiency across Bioventus.
Now turning to our results for the fourth quarter revenue of $135 million came in above our expectations and represented growth of 8% higher compared to the prior year. Adjusting for the divestiture of our Wound business revenue growth increased 14% when compared to the prior year. In addition, adjusted EBITDA of $22 million increased $5 million when compared to the prior year. The increase was driven by the increase in revenue across pain treatments. Revenue growth accelerated as sales increased 23% compared to the prior year as we maintained our strong double digit volume growth driven by growing unit volumes were higher for both supermarkets and Johnson as well.
We saw favorable pricing driven by last year's catch-up and rebates, which provided a favorable comparison revenue for the fourth quarter finished above our expectations due to higher volume, along with growth, lower rebate accruals. Looking ahead, we expect to sustain above-market volume growth given the clinical advantage of Dura-Line combined with the continued shift to a single objective injection therapy. From a pricing standpoint, there has been no change in our expectations from last quarter's earnings calls. We anticipate some headwinds through at least the first half of the year, but expect to see sequential improvement as we move throughout the year.
Overall, we see revenue growth in 2024 to be mid to high single digits. Surgical Solutions revenue growth accelerated as we grew 12% and ultrasonics maintained double digit growth. Both was sponsor term higher than adjusted anticipated generator sales at the end of the year. Additionally, bone graft substitutes grew high-single digits as volume from the new distributor relationships added in the previous two quarters, ramped ahead of our expectations.
In addition to the structural changes to our BGS selling efforts announced last quarter to drive dedicated focus on ultrasonics and VGS. helped to minimize distributor turnover moving forward, we remain excited about the momentum in ultrasonics, giving our leading technology, a small market share. This view is reinforced from the recent feedback from customers who refer to our ultrasonics portfolio as revolutionary when Dr. Robin, I spent time in the field earlier this year. Additionally, given the recent changes, BBTS., we feel the business is poised to return to more consistent growth in 2024. Combined, we expect our Surgical Solutions business to grow between high single to double digits in 2024.
Shifting to our Restorative Therapies. Sales fell 16%, driven by the impact of our Wound business divestiture, which accounted for 20 percentage points of the decline. On an organic basis, restorative therapies increased four percentage points. Growth was driven by Exogen where we continue to see improved stabilization as revenue in the U. S, maintain and sequential growth. Excluding the impact of our own divestiture, we anticipate low single-digit growth in 2024 for restorative therapies.
Finally, as we previewed on our earnings call last quarter, our international segment fell 4% with constant currency growth, down 6% for the year. Our international segment grew 10% and it is expected to maintain double digit growth in 2024. Growth was impacted by a prior year comparison for above-normal volume as back orders were filled for products in advanced rehabilitation. Partially offsetting this headwind was continued strength across our Surgical Solutions business.
Moving down the income statement, adjusted gross margin of 71% increased 20 basis points compared to the prior year. Gross margin came in below our expectations due to transitory inventory write-offs. Overall, adjusted total operating expenses were at a similar level compared to the prior year. The expense reductions resulting from our restructuring and wind business divestiture were offset by higher commissions related to revenue growth this year and employee incentives, which were not accrued in the prior year.
Now turning to our bottom line financial metrics. Adjusted operating income increased to $20 million from $13 million in the prior year, while adjusted net income totaled $6 million compared to a loss of $6 million a year ago. Adjusted earnings per share were $0.07 for the quarter compared to a loss of $0.02 in the prior year. Now for a brief recap of our full year results. Net sales of $512 million or even compared to 2022. Organic sales increased 4%, while adjusting for the impact of our wind divestiture for the year, adjusted EBITDA totaled $89 million and represented a 30% increase compared to the prior year. Adjusted gross margin for the year was 74% compared to 75% a year ago.
Our 2023 adjusted gross margin reflects the impact of lower average selling price for the year in our AJ. franchise. Adjusted operating income for the year totaled $81 million compared to $51 million in 2022. Lower operating expenses from our focus throughout the year on reducing spending and benefits from our restructuring drove the increase.
Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended the quarter with $37 million of cash on hand and $395 million of debt outstanding. We had $18 million drawn on our revolving credit facility at the end of the fourth quarter. Operating cash flow represented an inflow of $10 million as higher net income drove the improvement compared to the prior year.
From a liquidity perspective, our adjusted EBITDA for 2023 exceeded our expectations and we are well within compliance with our leverage and interest coverage covenants at the end of the fourth quarter. Additionally, we recently engaged our banking partners and amended our credit agreement to provide additional headroom in our leverage and interest coverage covenants through the third quarter of 2025 without impacting the spread of our term loan. As we project forward, we anticipate cash flow in 2024 to be significantly higher than 2023 and allow us to pay the amortization on our term loan. With the reduction in debt. We forecast our net leverage to be below four times by the end of the year.
Finally, let me lay out our 2024 financial guidance based on current trends in our business, we expect net sales to be in a range of $520 million to $535 million for the year. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $89 million and $94 million. And finally, our guidance for adjusted earnings per share is expected to be $0.12 to $0.20. Similar to prior years, we expect our first quarter revenue and adjusted EBITDA to be the lowest for the year in the fourth quarter to be the highest for the year with the second and third quarters looking fairly similar. Contributing to the acceleration in EBIT. Ebitda and earnings throughout the year will be a fairly consistent level of operating expenses each quarter.
In closing, the execution of our business plan the past year has significantly strengthened our liquidity position and with our improved processes and controls, our visibility into our business has increased, leading to what we believe will be improved predictability. As we start the new year, we plan to enhance our revenue growth and cash flow while we maintain spending discipline.
Operator, please open the line for questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session to ask a question. You may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time we will pause momentarily to assemble our Our first question today comes from Chase Knickerbocker with Craig Hallum Capital. Please go ahead.

Chase Knickerbocker

Good morning, guys. Congrats on the results. Some pretty impressive results relative to expectations, certainly And welcome, Rob Maybe the first one for you on, you know, as you kind of looked at opportunities, what kind of sealed the deal for Bioventus, particularly with kind of the situation that we're in now kind of you being able to kind of continue this turnaround that certainly started and showed up in Q4 results.

Robert Claypoole

Maybe kind of go into a little bit more color there and then chase, looking forward to meeting, you said there were a few factors. I touched on them upfront, but I was looking at different opportunities that you have by Ventas is in large growing market segments. We have excellent world-class technology and favorable share positions and customers who understand our value and you don't want them out in the field with markup it's not just that our customers understand the benefits of our technology for their patients and for them, but also the reasons behind that and get a real feel for until after I joined, but I was familiar with the technology for and that combination of the market segments we're in the technology and the favorable share positions really spoke to the potential of the Company.
And then when talking to the Board and the management team, it was clear to me that some of the headwinds that the company had faced were temporary and with the right focus, particularly with commercial execution and operational excellence that there was potential significant potential to drive shareholder value. So those are some of the reasons that made it a really attractive move from a Chase.

Chase Knickerbocker

Yes, makes sense. And maybe digging in a little bit more on pain on the drilling side, growth on a volume perspective continues to be pretty strong year over year. And our checks on as we start to see ASPs approved improved sequentially, kind of talk through the kind of the drivers of above market volume growth and kind of being able to have that above market volume growth off of some pretty tough comps from a volume growth perspective in 2023?

Mark Singleton

Yes, Chase, this is Mark. I'm sure the question will be again, talk about drilling. I mean, we take the first three quarters really continue the momentum into fourth Q through the clinical differentiation that we have in that product. I think also the market is moving to a single injection.
And so we're favorable there with our clinical leverage differentiation as the market moves. And as we've talked about before, as well. We have a really strong contract position with several UnitedHealth with with Aetna and Cigna. Some of these contracts have come into play in 2023 that drove a lot of the growth and will be a comparison for us in 2024. But one strong contract position that we have is really driving a lot of the volume growth but what we're also executing really well on with our sales team is the pull through around those contracts and we got the contracts in place and really the sales team on really what have we got to give a shout out to them and they're really doing a great job of executing around these contracts and pulling in the other volume, more profitable volume around the contracts that are really having us hit that.

Chase Knickerbocker

And we expect that to continue and into 2024 and with us, pull pull through is much more profitable and then maybe how should we think about volume growth for Joelsson from this year as you kind of talked about there? Is that kind of headwind as things continue to transition to single injection products.
And then just lastly for Rob, and if we think about that kind of that transition that we kind of talked about last quarter, bringing bone graft substitutes back to distributors largely at least that being the focus.
Rob, do you think that that's, you know, the Q4 results kind of prove it that's kind of the right structure of the sales force ultrasonics to the internal field reps and kind of leveraging relationships from distributors on the bone graft side. And maybe we are harvesting more modest synergies between the two Yes, Jason, I'll take the first one on just on them yet.

Mark Singleton

And I think we continue to expect to drive growth in 2024 on Johnson as well. I mean, the market is moving the drilling, which is we're going to where we have a favorable contract position. But that doesn't mean that yields are going to decline. I think we're well positioned well that we know obviously, it's a low price point, but we're continuing to to have success in driving volume there as well.

Robert Claypoole

Yes, Chase, on the bone graft substitute side, of our our volume accelerated ahead of our expectations. And in part that's due to the change that we made and the reduction in distributor turnover. So we feel good about that change and overtime, we're going to scale the Surgical Solutions business with some infrastructure that we put in place.

Chase Knickerbocker

Great. Thanks for the questions. And again, congrats on a great quarter.

Mark Singleton

Thanks.

Operator

The next question comes from Robert Marcus with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi. This is actually Lili on for Robbie and thanks for taking the question. Maybe just on guidance on revenue and EBITDA guidance came in better than what the Street was thinking, but EPS fell short. So can you talk about any dynamics below the line that might be driving that shortfall? And if there's any specific headwinds or tailwinds we should be keeping in mind as we think about forecasting EPS this year?

Mark Singleton

Yes, I think we feel good about our revenue growth. But I think coming out of Q4 into Q1, we're looking forward to return to focusing on growing the top line in the bottom in 2024. You look at the bottom end of our guidance is roughly 4% growth at the top end, roughly 7%.
From an EBITDA perspective, as we've told you in our third quarter call, we're not expecting a significant increase in EBITDA from 2024, but mainly just back to the two year recovery that we've seen that we've talked about some, but over the long term, certainly expected trying to focus on and expect to be driving the bottom line faster than the top line as we are continuing to work through 2024.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just maybe as a follow-up to that, I think gross margin has seen some fluctuation and headwinds from some of these reimbursement challenges. So how should we be thinking about margins progressing from here on what headwinds and tailwinds should you be keeping in mind as we update our models, if you if you look at our gross, our gross margin from 2023 and 2024 expected to be even year to year.

Mark Singleton

So don't expect a significant change. If you look at Q4 specifically, we had a write off that impacted the fourth quarter margin. That is really a one-time write off that was related to them are ultrasonics portfolio and really a product transition where we evaluated them the old inventory that we had and the potential disruption for customers that we wanted to avoid and looked at the excess inventory and took a one-time write-off in 4Q that was that should not repeat from. But from an overall 23 to 24, we won't we don't expect any some significant changes on margin.

Okay, thanks so much.

Operator

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one to enter the question queue. Next question comes from Caitlin Cronin with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

Caitlin Cronin

Congrats on a good quarter, just with two treatments, impressive growth in the Q4 in 2024, do you expect most of the growth to a degree driven by dual lanes? We expect growth in all three product lines to really drive that mid to high single-digit growth.

Mark Singleton

Thanks, Cait. And I appreciate the question again. We are the only company out there with the with a full portfolio of the one, three and five injections, we feel really good about the clinical differentiation that we have internally and certainly growth percentage wise, Sterling will definitely lead the way, but we will continue to expect Janssen to grow as we talked about earlier in the year.
Two parts is a great story in that we have haven't had great expectations with that, I'd say over the last few years, but it continues to outperform our expectations. So we would look to that to be a low single-digit grower. So the portfolio really led by early and back to the great contract positions we have in the market and with the execution on the falling through volume by our sales team, which we're really proud of. We expect that to continue into 2024. But the whole portfolio, we definitely we'd expect to grow volume-wise. And as we mentioned in the prepared remarks about having some pricing headwinds related to CMS from a year-over-year perspective in the first half of the year, but expect that that will sequentially improve as we go through 2024 Got it.

Caitlin Cronin

Okay. And then just turning to Exogen, you noted continued improvement in the US in Q4 and how did action perform globally in Q4? And and what are your growth expectations in 2024 for both you and you?

Mark Singleton

Yes, when we own AxoGen, AxoGen's a significant opportunity for us. I think we've been disappointed over the last few years where we have had that product declining from and it started to return back to at least being even then a slightly positive growth in Q4.
When we look at this product over the long term, we really looked at it from a low single digit grower. The team has spent a lot a lot of time in, say the management team myself, Rob, early on and the leaders of that organization really getting into this business and trying to figure out how are we going to increase this and maintain and sustain the growth that we've started. I mean this is another situation, Rob and I went into the field and spent some time with some sales reps well and really learned a lot about the details of this with all of our sales reps. And so when we look into the future, again, we're B&O confident that we can return this back to small single digit growth. And it's a great product and a lot of positive feedback from the physicians and in the field.

Robert Claypoole

And Cait, I'll just echo what Mark said. I mean, as you probably know, fantastic proven technology and an excellent brand recognition. And just like Mark said, the customer feedback during our visits has been extremely positive. So we're bringing back the appropriate level of focus to the business. And now we're going to address some operational inefficiencies along the way in order to return the business to growth.

Caitlin Cronin

Great. Thank you.

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Rob. Please poll for any closing.

Robert Claypoole

Thanks, Betsy, and thanks again, everyone, for your interest and momentum. We drove a significant improvement across our business in 2023. And now we look to build on our momentum with stronger execution as we focus on our mission on accelerating revenue growth and cash flow and on creating shareholder value. Thanks for joining our call today and have a good day.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.