Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:A) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Puneet Souda : Mike, Bob, thanks for taking the question. I mean to say this is impressive as a quarter is an understatement in the sort of uncertain times. So first of all, congrats on the quarter. Mike, so on China, impressive results there. Can you just parse that out a bit? I know you talked about gas chromatography delays were there, and those are — it looks like they’re fully booked in this quarter and the revenues booked or food is also impressive. Could you maybe talk about the order book visibility you have in China and your growth expectations there going forward despite the Lunar Year? And also, what is the longer-term expectation for overall growth in China, just given the multiple end markets that are working so well for you in the quarter?

Mike McMullen: Yes, sure, Puneet. Happy to respond and Bob and I probably can have tag team on this. But again, thanks for your earlier comments, brought a lot of smiles in the room here. Yes, we were quite pleased with the results for China, not only in the quarter but for the year. And I think it’s important to know the 44% print we had in Q4 wasn’t just about catch-up from deferred revenue due to the COVID; and again, shutdowns. And again, it points to the fact that when you do see those types of things happen, eventually, the business does materialize. We didn’t lose any business. I think the strength of the business continues to be there across multiple end markets, really been led by pharma, chemical. And then we think that the food market will probably normalize to kind of the traditional growth rates in China.

But expecting pharma and the CAM marketplace to be strong, in particular, a lot of — we expect a lot of business on the renewable energy and HPI side in China as well. So that Advanced Materials segment, we’ve been talking a lot about, we think is going to sustain the growth in China in ’23. But I think we’re kind of looking at maybe high singles for China for next year. Is our initial thinking?

Robert McMahon : Yes, that’s right. And Puneet, I would say the strength that we saw in Q4 in China was really across the board across all the major technology platforms within the instrument business. The consumables business was incredibly strong as well. And then the services business, if you recall back in Q3, we said that activity hadn’t fully come back, was fully back in Q4. And so we saw very strong there. And not to forget, DGG. We had double-digit growth in our Diagnostics and Genomics business as well. So it was really broad-based. And you talked about visibility, orders continue to grow in China. And we have very good visibility in — certainly into the first half of this year. And as we think about the secular growth drivers, those are still in place.

If you think about the investments that are made in technologies around the biotechnology areas, but increasingly actually in advanced materials and some of the secular drivers around batteries and lithium-ion production and so forth. And we would expect that to continue into next year for sure.

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