Daniel A. Carestio
President, Chief Executive Officer and Director at STERIS
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for making time to join us to hear more about our first quarter performance and our outlook for the rest of the fiscal year. As you heard from Mike, we had a strong start to our new fiscal year exceeding our plans and STERIS' expectations. Looking at our segments, Healthcare, constant currency organic revenue grew 18% in the quarter. We experienced double-digit growth across capital equipment, consumables and service. This is driven primarily by procedure volumes in the U.S. continuing to rebound as well as price and market share gains. In addition, the improving supply chain environment, coupled with our ability to reduce lead times, led to a very strong quarter of capital equipment shipments. Hospital capital spending remains robust as evidenced by our healthcare backlog, which totals almost $500 million at the end of the quarter despite the strong shipments. Large projects continue to drive orders representing 40% of first quarter orders. We are increasingly confident in our expectations of a strong year for our Healthcare segment. Turning to AST. Constant currency organic revenue grew 5%. Our performance in the quarter was impacted by two temporary situations, inventory destocking in some categories of med tech and the year-over-year market decline of bioprocessing customer demand. As we said last quarter, FY '24 represents a bit of a reset and we do not anticipate returning to year-over-year growth in bioprocessing in fiscal 2024. As for the med tech inventory destocking, we would not expect that to continue beyond the first half of the year, and we anticipate customer inventories at that time will align with the procedural growth we are all experiencing. As a result, our expectations are for stronger growth in the second half of the year for AST.
Life Sciences revenue declined slightly in the quarter due to the timing of capital shipments which more than offset the growth in service and consumables. Underlying demand for the business remains strong as evidenced by our near-record backlog. Our full year expectations for the Life Sciences segment continue to be mid-single-digit revenue growth despite the lumpy first quarter start. Our Dental segment first quarter revenue declined 4% on a constant currency organic basis as revenue was limited by customer destocking of inventory, in particular, for infection control products. However, we did see patient volumes improve for the first time post-COVID. We are confident that we will achieve low single-digit revenue growth for the fiscal year in Dental. All in, we are pleased with the start to the year. Trends continue to shift in a positive direction and our ability to execute and ship products has greatly improved. There are still pockets of uncertainty, whether that be supply chain, procedure volumes or inventory management. As mentioned in our press release, we believe that the acquisition of the surgical instrumentation assets from Becton, Dickinson will close much earlier than we originally anticipated. As a result, we have updated our outlook for as reported revenue, adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow. We are feeling increasingly optimistic about our constant currency organic performance for the year, yet we are still holding our outlook to 6% to 7% growth. We acknowledge that this is a somewhat conservative approach given our start to the year. That concludes our prepared remarks. Julie, would you please give the instructions, and we can begin Q&A.