Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference. I'm Jayson Bedford. I cover the medical device sector. We're very happy to have with us today the senior management team of Baxter. We've got the company's CFO, Joel Grade, as well as senior VP of investor relations, Clare Trachtman. So with that, I'll hand it over to Joel. Thank you very much. All right. Something is tech support here as well. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate your interest in Baxter. I look forward to the opportunity here to present, and I'll look forward to taking any questions y'all have as well. Certainly, one of the things we always like to start with at Baxter is our mission, and that is the company's place in the healthcare system and, again, our commitment to saving and sustaining lives. Certainly, obviously, through so much of what we do, the work that we did at North Cove and so many other things, that's obviously evident, and it drives everything that we do here at Baxter. I'm going to talk through a few highlights here, and then I'll obviously do some deeper dive into this today. But the first is just a little bit of a reset of, so where are we today as Baxter? There's been a lot of change, certainly over the last couple of years, and I certainly am excited about the place we sit in today. And so you'll see here kind of at the top level, executing our strategic transformation to accelerate performance. Back in 2023, we announced some key strategic initiatives, which I'll talk about in a second. But the good news is we are through those things. And so the last of which, of course, was the sale of our kidney business. As a company, part of what we do, and again, the space we occupy in healthcare is benefits, so a very balanced and diverse portfolio, and again, driving those results in support of the mission. Again, another key highlight is the sale of Vantive. Again, we had over $3.4 billion of after-tax proceeds from that deal. We have so far deployed over $3 billion towards debt paydown, which is an important part for us as we think about our commitments that we've made and our target leverage ratio at the end of this year, which was the three times net debt to EBITDA. This obviously was a significant part of our debt paydown story, as well as obviously a key strategic milestone. We've also provided guidance in 2025, talked about a 4%-5% top line number. We've talked about a 16.5% adjusted operating margin. Later on, I will take you through a slide that actually helps you bridge between where we are today and that 16.5%. That's a question we get frequently, so I'll plan to address that. And the final highlight, I guess, again, to this sort of exact sum slide is that our North Cove facility, which was our solutions plant in North Carolina, which of course was impacted substantially by Hurricane Helene, is actually now producing at pre-hurricane levels. And so a lot of really important kind of tidbits here to summarize where we are at Baxter today. So just a drill down level here, we talked about these key actions to deliver shareholder value. Again, back in January 2023, there were three things that were announced. One, we're going to verticalize the business. Two, the sale of BPS and then the Kidney Care business. As a reminder, the verticalization of the business basically took Baxter from what was a country-led model or a geographically-led model, if you will, to where we actually had three verticals where leaders of our businesses owned the end-to-end in each of three, again, medical products and therapies. Again, so the MPT business, HST, which was the former Hillrom business, and then Pharmaceuticals. And again, somebody now owns everything from end-to-end commercial manufacturing, et cetera. And each of those is a really important piece of how we changed our business model. And again, strategically important in terms of our ability to execute consistently. We then also completed the divestiture of BioPharma Solutions, or BPS. This was in quarter three of 2023, and obviously we used $3.7 billion for debt payment there as well, which at the time was consistent with our capital allocation priorities in order to pay down debt. Finally, the sale of the kidney care business, which was again known as Vantive. We sold this business to Carlyle. We closed on January 31st, took home $3.4 billion in net after-tax proceeds, which exceeded our original expectations, which actually started out around $3 billion. We had elevated that guidance to a little bit higher than that in the $3.15 billion-$3.25 billion. And for a lot of, again, good strategic tax reasons, ended up at $3.4 billion, which again, $3 billion of which has already been used to pay down debt. And so the fact that all those have now been accomplished leaves us with what we'll call our new chapter of Baxter, which has a couple of items that I think are of note. One, again, an increasingly agile company, a company who's better positioned to invest for growth and innovation. And if you think about where we were previously with kidney, that was a business that had about half the return on invested capital as the rest of the company and was actually quite, again, cash-heavy from an investment perspective. So what this allows us to do today is to get more nimble and agile from an operations perspective, from a capital allocation perspective, really targeted, focused in those areas that drive outsized and higher returns and growth for our company. And again, what we think about as strategically, who are we now post-kidney? Again, for those of you not as familiar with the story, kidney had a significant component that was home delivery business. So today, we do not have that as a component of our business. So we think of ourselves now as an essential healthcare partner, again, with an unmatched portfolio of market-leading devices, medicines, and technologies. That's who our company is. That's how our portfolio of products fits together. Again, we're focusing on customer-inspired innovation. I'm going to give you some examples of that in a little bit. But I think the key here is the words customer-inspired. These are innovations that are not only innovative just for the sake of being innovative, but innovative for the sake of what customers are looking for in the marketplace. Certainly, again, in the care settings where we are best positioned for success. And then I think, again, we have an exceptional team of people focused on a mission and consistent execution. And our objective is to be much more consistent, more predictable in a way that actually, again, is, again, with some of the challenges and some of the ups and downs we've had over the last couple of years, something that we are certainly striving for and again, feel good about how we're positioned to move forward. Now, I'm not going to drain all this, obviously, but what I wanted to just give you a perspective on across our segments, when we talk about customer-centric innovation, what's some of the things that are on the docket and what are some of the things you should be thinking about and just some, I guess, some perspective on some of the scale of the portfolio products that we have that we're positioning for the future. And obviously, with MPT, right now, it starts with Novum. Again, the work that we're doing, the Novum pump, the launch actually happened just before the midpoint of last year. The demand has been outstanding. The performance of the product itself has been outstanding. We've talked about the fact that we have, again, a very competitive product that has certainly lots of areas that are differentiated in that space. Again, we've continued to increase our share by competitive wins as well as replacements. But you'll see here that some of the examples of the things that are both in the ITT and the Advanced Surgery of things that we've launched as part of our current portfolio and some of the exciting work that we're doing for the future as well. For HST, Healthcare Systems Technologies, again, this is primarily the old Hillrom business, but things that, in today, you'll see the two businesses there in the CCS are Care and Connectivity Solutions and obviously Frontline Care. In both cases, we have a number of things within our current portfolio that obviously have a breadth and depth both in capital and some of the replacement products that are used in the hospital space. But you'll see some of the near-term launches that we have as well. And again, as we think about what is the purpose of each of our businesses in here, here at HST, this is a big part of driving innovation in this company. And you'll see there's also some things in the future and things that actually we don't have on here that I look forward to talking to you about as those play out here for competitive reasons we haven't listed. But this is obviously a perspective on the fact that we have a really significant and robust innovation pipeline coming. And then from a pharmaceuticals perspective, obviously the two businesses that you see on the screen are the Injectables and Anesthesia and Drug Compounding. Clearly, one of the things we've talked about over the last year or so is the amount of products that we're rolling out in our injectables portfolio. This is something that our leader of pharma has continued to stress, and we've been in 2024, had double-digit product launches. We anticipate that same thing in 2025, and so this is, again, consistent innovation in the space and something you should expect from us, and to be perfectly clear, we're not all the way to bright on our innovation journey at Baxter, but the point of this is we do have, we're definitely, we're certainly not starting from ground zero, and the reality of it is this is a key focus of our investments and our capital allocation as we move forward as a company, and so as I talked about before, some other kind of components of this strategic transformation, again, that talks about a more streamlined, agile company. From a financial perspective, we've talked about the fact that we're targeting 4%-5% sales growth on annual basis. That's a, I'd say the base way to think about our company. And I often get the question, is that, you know, is that an organic and inorganic growth? And the way I would say to that is that over time, you know, again, we'd like to earn the right to be able to do things also inorganically, but on a smaller scale, meaning fold-in tuck-in deals, not large material acquisitions. But there's areas that when we make investments in our organic portfolio, and there might be areas we have the opportunity to buy, again, in order to supplement that. But from a 4%-5% operational growth annually is something, again, you should think about this as from a base company. We talked about driving sales faster than our markets, you know, expanding our margins, you know, through innovation, through market expansion. And then adjusted operating margins. We're not going to just focus on top line. We're actually going to do that profitably. One of the things you'll hear me talk about often is leverage. We want to be able to be in a place where we generate growth and that our margins are higher than our sales growth, our expenses are growing lower than our sales growth, our OI grows at a faster rate than our sales growth, as does, of course, our EPS. And you'll see here for 2025, we're accomplishing just that, again, with a 4%-5% top line and growth. And again, an operating margin of 16.5% bottom line, which again is good operating leverage. From a capital perspective, we've talked about that we're targeting to have 80% free cash flow conversion, which is driven by, again, anticipated improvement operating results, but also enhancements from our working capital. Now, in 2025, one of the things that we've talked about is the fact that in Q1, we're still going to have some impact from what I'm going to call Hurricane Helene payables, meaning we took the expenses in Q4, but we're going to actually pay the payables in Q1, and there's some level of inventory restock as well, so from a cash flow perspective, you should expect some of that impact in Q1, but beyond that, and as we go forward, I certainly anticipate this being a company that generates free cash flow in a way that we've outlined here. And that focus on our free cash flow, as well as the debt paydown that we've already talked about, is a key element of targeting our three times net debt to EBITDA that we've targeted by the end of 2025. This is obviously an important element for us from a target perspective. What it allows us to do once we've reached that point is to really essentially reset and reestablish the way we allocate capital. We've talked about, you know, our first priority at this point is to pay down debt. But going forward, those investments in our business, the opportunity to restart a buyback program, we've obviously committed to a dividend that we've right-sized based on the sale of our kidney business. And overall, from those investments we're making within our company, deploying capital towards higher growth, higher return opportunities, as we talked about. And so I think, again, from that perspective, there's a lot of good stuff there. And again, set up well by the fact that we've now completed some of these transformational initiatives as we look forward to the future here of Baxter. Now, I did promise you a walk on the operating income bridge because there's been a lot of questions and some level of confusion, I would say, to this. And the way I would think about this is really the following, which is even slightly different than on this slide, but I'll say it in my own words. We're starting with a 13.9% operating margin in 2024. If you then add back what's 40 basis points of the Hurricane Helene impact, because we're obviously not anticipating that in 2025, you then add about 220-225 basis points of stranded costs. Now if I'm sitting here in 2024, I'm adding the 220 to the 13.9. Why? Because as a continuing operations business, all those costs that were previously allocated to kidney now sit with the continuing operations of the company. If you add those two things back and then you add 100 basis points of operational margin expansion for 2025, that 100 basis points comes from growth in sales. It comes from a positive mix contribution, which was a headwind in 2024, but expected tailwind in 2025. It comes from pricing. We renegotiated two of the three large GPO agreements, and we've anticipated 100 basis points on an enterprise-level impact from a pricing perspective in 2025. We talked about ISC improvements that we continue to anticipate. Those operational expansions will be another contribution of 100 basis points. That basically takes you to what would be 17.5% margin if you keep doing my math. And then there's two things that are going to go the opposite direction from an operating margin perspective. One is a 60 basis point impact from MSAs, which are manufacturing services agreements, which are a result of the sale of kidney. Those are not reported, those are in our reported sales, but not operational. But the gross margin is a low, you know, low double digit. And so that's margin dilutive. And that takes out about 60 basis points. And then there's a 40 basis point impact of remaining stranded cost. So in 2025, we're expecting about $125 million of TSA income to offset our stranded costs and the remaining being taken out with cost containment activities outside of about 40 basis points. And so those numbers would ultimately get you to the 16.5%. People ask you, where's the degree of confidence in those numbers? I would say the degree of confidence in those numbers for me is actually quite high. You know, obviously Hurricane Helene impact, it's certainly, you know, knock on wood, not something we'll be repeating again this year. Certainly the impact that we're taking from both the TSA income and the cost containment activity on the stranded cost, as well as the operational expansion ideas that I talked about earlier, I feel confident in those both from pricing mix, ISC. And so again, and the leverage we take off our sales growth, all those things I think contribute significantly to this and again, feel good about those numbers. And so as we move forward, I think what I'd like you to take away from me today and from our company is that, you know, we have some continuing momentum we're building. We had a strong fourth quarter. And again, the business has continued momentum here as we head into 2025. We're certainly getting asked the question all the time as well, how does your, how do you feel about the portfolio and where does all that sit today? I would tell you, we're certainly on a material basis. We're in a good place from a company perspective. We will always be continuing to assess whether it's select products, whether it's select geographies that we want to either get into or move out of. The example would be we've talked about the fact that we're looking to exit our solutions business in China, which obviously is certainly, you know, financially beneficial, if you will, to exit that. We're certainly looking to continue to drive benefits from our vertical operating model. Again, in a world today where we are in a, again, a more agile, more nimble place with vertical structure and doing work to reset everything from some of our manufacturing to our distribution operations, where, again, the exit of the home care delivery from Vantive is a significant opportunity for us to simplify our distribution network. Then finally, we are expecting to appoint a new CEO into this next chapter. That person will be focused on a more innovative company, a more streamlined company, more agile company, one that again operates effectively and consistently. And again, the timing of that certainly, again, I would say our board is working expeditiously, but doing so in order to get the right person and looking at both internal and external candidates. So with that, I will end the presentation and take any questions. Well done, Joel. Thank you. We've got a few minutes left, so maybe I'll just start for both Joel and Clare. One, I guess, what do you think is your weighted average growth rate today? And then secondly, this time last year, the business was expected to grow 3%-4%. Now you're talking 4%-5%. If you have to identify kind of where those incremental drivers are, where are they in the business? Sure. We'll start with the WAMGR. Yeah, I'll start with the WAMGR. So as we look at it today, and what we've said historically is our WAMGR is somewhere between 3%-4%. I'd say it's probably, you know, heading towards, you know, the mid to higher part of that, but it's somewhere between the 3%-4%. As we, you know, as Joel has pointed out, as we continue to launch new products, get into new areas, and as we think to the future, our goal is to try to continue to increase that WAMGR above that. Yeah, I think the differentiator there to Clare's point here is if you think about the performance, for example, of MPT and the launch of Novum, again, some of the work that's being done again even in the nutrition space in that area, our Advanced Surgery is growing in excess of those market growth. And I think, you know, in pharmaceutical, it really comes down to new product launches, things that we're continually feeding the system of innovation. So I think, you know, to Clare just said it, I mean, I think the, you know, the ability to actually innovate and drive organic growth through that is something that we look to continue to push, push both the WAMGR and our ability to grow faster than our existing markets. Okay. Second point, I don't know, you asked the question on the 3%- 4% to the 4%- 5%. I'd say one of the biggest changes from 2024 to 2025 is just our expectation for HST. That business did decline last year and is expected to grow this year. The other two segments that we have really will grow kind of in line. Obviously, MPT did face the impact from the hurricane in the fourth quarter, so we'll have a slightly easier comp, but I'd say both pharma and MPT kind of growing in line with that to slightly better on the MPT side. Then HST is really kind of what drives that improvement to the 4%-5%. Just to be clear, Joel, I think you said it in the prepared remarks, but the thought here is that 4%-5% on the top line is a sustainable rate going forward. Yes, that's correct. Okay. You mentioned Novum. Just would love to get a little bit more of an expanded conversation on the infusion pump opportunity. I think you've talked about share being in the 20s today. Where can it go and just the general framing of the pump market today? Is it, are you seeing a bit of a tailwind as some of these older devices get replaced? Yeah, I'll start and then I can turn it over to Clare for her comments. We are seeing that. We're in the middle of, I would say, a solid replacement cycle that's happening. I think there's a lot of people selling a lot of pumps, but certainly we're one of those. And again, from a share perspective, you know, we've always talked about, you know, over our Spectrum pump was taking a point a year in share and that our Novum pump actually we think is two times that. We've had substantial competitive wins as well as replacements with the pump. Again, I think, as I've said before, the launch itself went extremely well. I think, you know, some of the fact that this was rolled out in Canada for a year in advance. They gave the opportunity to work out any kinks and tweaks on that. I think this thing has been extremely well received. We do anticipate the replacement cycle continuing. I'd say for the next, you know, 18 months to a couple of years. I think we're certainly, you know, we got a half year out of the Novum pump last year. We'll get a full year in 2025. We certainly expect continued momentum going forward. Clare, anything you'd add? Frontline Care, I realize it's only what, 10-ish% of sales. It's probably the only kind of blemish or weight on the growth right now. What do you need to do to get that back to kind of mid-single-digit growth? Yeah, so a couple of things there. Number one, and you know, last, one of the things that we've talked about here is that we had a very rough set of comparisons last year versus 2023 for a variety of reasons that included 2022 backlogs that were actually cleared out in 2023, some government programs, you know, VA hospital orders. There was a lot of, you know, some anticipated new construction starts that didn't happen. And so I would just tell you, I think some of what you're seeing as we head into next year is not necessarily something that is a, you know, we're all sort of resetting our growth rates, if you will, but again, some easier comps versus where we were in 2024. I do think though that we're seeing some, again, I'd say stabilizing of the primary care markets, which is part of what's impacting our, you know, frontline growth and I think your Frontline Care growth, excuse me. So I think as we head into this year, the stabilization of those markets we've already started to see as we head into this year, something that I think is actually going to be beneficial for us. I agree. I mean, I think one of the key factors is we don't expect to face the magnitude of headwinds in 2025 that we saw in 2024. Okay. Maybe just as the last one, margin question. I realize that 25 is a bit of a quirky comp, but as you think about margin expansion beyond 25, assuming the 4%-5% top line still holds, is 50 basis points the right level? How do you balance the growth here? And kind of even if you don't want to peg a number on it, what are the factors that we should consider? Yeah, so we haven't guided specifically to that. We have said that we anticipate, you know, continued margin expansion post the 2025 number, and I think the way I would think about some of the key drivers of that are really the following and fairly consistent with what he talked about this year. Number one, it's the new product launches and the opportunity to actually go to market with new innovations, obviously at likely some type of premium pricing that will actually be a margin driver really across our businesses. Secondly, I would continue to think about, again, some pricing opportunities. Certainly in 2025, we're expecting that from the GPO negotiations, more modest levels of that in, you know, normal years like a 2026, but still positive. 2027, again, there'll be another renegotiation of the third GPO that would happen. Again, the negotiation would be in 2026, but obviously heading into 2027. I anticipate continued benefits from a product mix perspective and from a mix perspective in general. As HST continues to recover and improve, that's a positive mix contribution. Selling injectables at higher levels is a positive mix. Selling things like, again, Advanced Surgery is a mix. And so I think where that was a headwind in 2024, we expect it to be a tailwind in 2025 and beyond that as well. ISC, I think we continue to have anticipated improvements from an ISC perspective. And then finally, just leverage, you know, again, as we continue to grow, our company will do a better job of actually just generating leverage from an expense perspective as we go forward. Those are some of the key things I would anticipate as drivers of margin benefit for the company. Okay. Great. We're bumping up against our allotment. Thank you so much, Joel, Clare. The breakout is in Almirante One downstairs. Thank you. Thank you.