Marc N. Casper
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Thermo Fisher Scientific
Thank you Raf. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us today for our first-quarter call. As you saw in our press release, we had a very strong start to the year. We delivered another quarter of very strong financial performance. Our core business is performing very well. I am pleased with the team's great execution and the share gain we saw across our company, especially within the context of a slightly more challenging macro-environment. Our continued success is the result of our proven growth strategy, the trusted partner status that we've earned with our customers and our PPI business system, which is a differentiator for us and enables operational excellence within the company.
So, let me first recap the financials, our revenue in the quarter was $10.71 billion. Our adjusted operating income was $2.33 billion and we delivered another quarter of strong adjusted EPS performance achieving $5.03 per share. At the beginning of the year, we set-out appropriately ambitious guidance for 2023 and Q1 demonstrates that we're delivering against that. Let me turn to our end-markets. We delivered very strong performance in Q1 driven by outstanding execution from our team, resulting in meaningful share gain. Pandemic related activity performed as we had expected during the quarter.
As a reminder, the impact of the headwind from the revenue run off can be seen in pharma and biotech due to vaccines and therapies and in diagnostics and healthcare due to COVID-19 testing. Let me give you some color on our end-markets. Starting with pharma and biotech, we delivered growth in the mid single-digits for the quarter. During the quarter, we had very strong performance in our pharma services, clinical research and chromatography and mass spectrometry businesses. In academic and government, we grew in the high-single-digits in the quarter, we delivered strong growth across a range of our businesses, including chromatography and mass-spectrometry, electron microscopy, as well as the research and safety market channel.
Academic and government demand were strong in all regions. In industrial and applied, we grew in the high-single-digits for the quarter, we saw strong growth in all of our analytical instrument businesses including electron microscopy, chemical analysis and chromatography and mass-spectrometry. Finally, in diagnostics and healthcare in Q1, revenue was approximately 45% lower than the prior year quarter. The team delivered very good core business growth during the quarter, led by our immunodiagnostics, microbiology and transplant diagnostic businesses.
I'll now turn to our proven growth strategy, which enables us to continue to deliver differentiated performance and setting us up for an even brighter future.
As a reminder, our growth strategy consists of three pillars. Developing high-impact, innovative new products, leveraging our scale in the high-growth and emerging markets and delivering a unique value proposition to our customers. Starting with the first pillar innovation, we had an excellent start to the year as we launched a number of high-impact new products across our businesses during the first-quarter. These technologies are further strengthening our industry leadership by enabling our customers to break new ground in their important work.
In elemental analysis, we launched the Thermo Scientific iCAP RQ Plus ICP-MS analyzer. This ICP mass-spectrometry system simplifies analysis of trace elements in complicated samples, including the identification of heavy metals in soil and water as well as toxic elements in food and beverage. In genetic sciences, we launched the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q AutoRun dPCR suite, an automated digital PCR solution to increase productivity for molecular research, including cell and gene therapy and cancer research.
In our Biosciences business, we launched the Invitrogen DynaGreen microplastic-free magnetic beads for protein purification. This new product will help our customers to reduce the environmental impact of life science research and builds on our long history of innovation and market leadership in bioscience reagents. And in our clinical diagnostics business, we launched the Thermo Scientific DRI tramadol assay, which broadens our extensive toxicology portfolio with a new drug of abuse assay to help fight the opioid crisis. These are just a few examples of the innovation going on across our company and I'm excited about the robust pipeline of products that will be launched throughout the year.
We also recently learned that Thermo Fisher was ranked number 22 on Fortune's Most Innovative Companies list. This is a new award launched in 2023, based on product and process innovation and the company's culture, a really nice recognition of our team and their track-record. The second pillar of our growth strategy is leveraging our scale in the high-growth and emerging markets to create a differentiated experience for our customers. We continue to strengthen our capabilities serving these markets by opening a new Gibco cell culture rapid prototyping facility at our existing site in Suzhou, China.
This facility will help regional customers accelerate the transition of their cell culture media production into current good manufacturing practices, it will also ensure patients receive therapies manufactured at the highest-level of safety, effectiveness, quality and purity. Turning to the third pillar of our growth strategy, we continue to enhance our customer value proposition by strengthening our capabilities to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. I've had the opportunity to meet with dozens of our pharmaceutical and biotech customers since the beginning of the year and our value proposition is clearly resonating.
Our trusted partner status gives us an early understanding of customers' unmet needs and the ability to generate insights that allow for deep collaborations that continue to advance scientific breakthroughs. During Q1, we achieved an exciting milestone in our strategic partnership with the University of California, San Francisco with the opening of a new cell therapy cGMP manufacturing and collaboration center to accelerate the development of breakthrough therapies for glioblastoma, multiple myeloma and other cancers.
In this facility, we offer UCSF and other customers solutions for cell therapy development from discovery to clinical research through to commercial manufacturing. Partnerships like this have the potential to transform clinical care. Another example of our customer value proposition and the trusted partner status that we have established with our pharma and biotech customers can be seen in the excellent performance of our clinical research business, which drove very strong growth in the quarter. I'm very excited by the revenue synergies that will drive both short-term and longer-term growth in the business, the momentum is continuing to build and is benefiting both our clinical research business and other parts of the company.
We're also working with very engaged customers on longer-term projects to explore ways to reduce the time and cost of bringing drugs to market. By bringing our capabilities and expertise within our pharma services and clinical research businesses together, we are working to improve the effectiveness of the drug development process, benefiting both our customers and their patients. We have an exciting pilot underway that is utilizing dedicated resources and best-in class technologies and capabilities to provide enhanced visibility and real-time data to the customer. This improves the speed of decision-making and reduces potential delays from development to manufacturing to clinical trials.
It can also help our customers take cost-out of the process by reducing waste in the clinical supply process. This is really a nice example of why we are the trusted partner. As always, our PPI Business System and our mission-driven culture enabled our success during the quarter. PPI engages and empowers all of our colleagues to find a better way, every day and it enables us to improve quality, productivity and the customer experience, while also helping us to navigate a dynamic environment.
You can see the positive impact of our PPI business system in our results in Q1. It has also allowed us to capitalize on the strong demand from customers for analytical instrumentation and has also helped us to effectively address the runoff in pandemic related activity and appropriately manage our costs. Moving to capital deployment, we've had an active start to the year, both in strategic M&A and return capital to our shareholders. We closed the acquisition of the Binding Site at the beginning of the year. It's great to have this business now as part of the company. The business is a fantastic fit with our specialty diagnostics business and we're leveraging our capabilities to take an excellent business and make it even better. The integration is going very smoothly and the business is performing very well, tracking ahead of plan.
Our team is focused on advancing the diagnosis and management of patients with multiple myeloma and immune disorders and the innovation pipeline looks great. We're excited by the opportunity to further advance patient-care in this area. In terms of return of capital during the quarter, we repurchased $3 billion of stock and increased our dividend by 17%, so overall, a great start to the year from capital deployment. During the quarter, we also advanced our environmental, social and governance priorities, including securing agreements to power all current US sites with 100% renewable energy by 2026.
This is a significant contribution to our 2030 commitment to a 50% reduction in Scope I and II greenhouse gas emissions. As we continue to transition away from fossil fuels and adopt renewable energy, we're also accelerating our progress towards our commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We'll be releasing our latest Corporate Social Responsibility Report later this quarter and we'll give our stakeholders a really substantive review on our continuous improvement and the positive impact that we're happening.
Let me now turn to our guidance. Since the beginning of the year, the macro-environment has become slightly more challenging. We're stepping up to that challenge and our proven growth strategy powered by our PPI Business System is enabling us to maintain our ambitious full-year outlook, with revenues of $45.3 billion and adjusted EPS of $23.70. Stephen will take you through the details in his remarks. So, to summarize our key takeaways from the first-quarter.
Our very strong results in Q1 were driven by our proven growth strategy and PPI business system. Our business is performing very well. Our unique customer value proposition is further elevating our trusted partner status and we're continuing to gain market-share. We effectively deploy capital to create significant value for our customers and shareholders and we're incredibly well-positioned to deliver differentiated performance and an excellent 2023 as we continue to create value for all of our stakeholders and build an even brighter future for our company.
With that, I'll now hand the call over to our CFO, Stephen Williamson. Stephen?
