Edwards Lifesciences Corporation (NYSE:EW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Daveen Chopra: Yes, I’ll just make a comment on TRISCEND. So for the TRISCEND II study, we expect obviously release the information in the second half of the year and release the information in the second half of the year. So we’re excited about the data we think to help it. But as you pull up here, I think this all helps us make us feel good about this year and then driving into 2024.

Michael Mussallem: Yes. And I’ll just add — this is Mike again, Larry. Yes, we’re feeling positive about 2024. It’s a long way off. So it’s too soon to give guidance at this point. But when we look at the road ahead, we really think as the system learns to deal with COVID and it fades back into the rearview mirror that structural heart patients are going to get prioritized again. And we think that they’re going to be anxious to treat these patients. We love our lineup of technologies, our lineup of clinical trials that are pointed in indication expansion. And so we see — that’s why we feel confident in that 2028 outlook.

Bernard Zovighian: Yes. And just to add on to that, we did see, as Mike mentioned, we saw some weeks in Q4 that were really strong. And I think it’s just evidence that staffing is gradually improving, maybe not as fast as we want. And we certainly saw some impact, especially around the holiday period, but we still have the SAPIEN 3 UR launch. We have other things that we’re really excited about, and we feel very good about next year — or this year, sorry.

Larry Biegelsen: That’s helpful. Just a quick follow-up. I didn’t hear anything — sorry if I missed it on the Alliance trial in Safety and X4, is there an update there?

Larry Wood: Yes. No, we don’t have any update there. I think what we said at the investor conference is we expect to be back in clinic this year, and we still anticipate that. But we don’t have anything new to add.

Operator: Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar: I think for the first question, Mike, on the TAVR trends, I think U.S. was up mid-singles overall TAVR up mid-singles, implies international was mid-single. So maybe talk was there any China impact or would happen in international. And I think on the last call, you noted half the centers in the U.S. were up double digits, half then were flattish. Was that a trend that you saw this quarter as well? Or how are you thinking about TAVR progression here?

Michael Mussallem: Yes. I’ll talk a little bit about OUS and then Larry can get a little deeper in the U.S. So outside the U.S., procedures grew in the mid-single digits. And as we mentioned, outside of Europe and Japan, it grew even faster. In Q4, we experienced some challenges that resulted in sort of, if you will, the U.S. and Europe in mid-single digit as expected, Japan was worse than we thought, and the rest of the world was better than we thought. So that’s sort of the way that things kind of netted out. We expect contributions from all the regions to be better in ’23 as we are projecting that 9% to 12% growth rate. Your other question was trying to differentiate what was different in the U.S?

Vijay Kumar: Sorry, half the centers were up double digits, I think, last quarter. Was there a trend that you saw this quarter as well?

Larry Wood: Yes. We saw significant variation on a site-to-site basis. Clearly, some centers, and I think it maybe reflects kind of localized COVID restrictions. Some centers certainly did better than other centers. And gradually, we see that improving over time. But larger centers probably did a little bit better than the smaller centers. You had a question on China as well. China was certainly impacted, but for our TAVR business, it’s such a small base. It’s not a huge driver one way or the other.

Vijay Kumar: That’s helpful, Larry. And Scott, maybe a quick 1 for you. I think Q1 guidance here at the midpoint almost, I think it’s hinting at 10% organic, close to high single, low double organic — what’s driving the sequential acceleration from the high singles organic we saw in Q4? Has the visibility improved? Or just talk about assumptions around Q1?

Scott Ullem: Well, it ties to what we’ve been talking about so far on the call, our guidance for Q1 is $1,350 to $1,450 million, so call it $1.410 billion in sales at the midpoint of the range. Which is if you just sort of think about how the year is going to play out at the lower end of the 9% to 12% underlying growth rate guidance that we’ve given for sales. So your question is what happened between Q4 and Q1 and it ties back to we’re just seeing generally a favorable environment, hospital staffing levels and health care disruptions gradually getting a little bit better. And it’s really very similar to what we talked about at our investor conference and reinforces our confidence about the 9% to 12% growth rate that we can achieve for the full year in 2023.

Operator: Our next question comes from Matt Taylor with Jefferies. We’ll move on to the next question. Our next question comes from Matt Miksic with Barclays.

Matthew Miksic: So I’ll keep it to one question. Just on some of the comments that you talked about, Scott, I think in your comments around starting to see some encouraging trends early this year, gradual improvements maybe towards the end of Q4. Given the sort of many things that have been talked about as potentially having this sort of slowing impact on U.S. TAVR trends around staffing availability of nurses and the confusion around some centers being double digits and some being slower. Can you maybe talk about a few things that you are seeing that sort of bring you to sort of point out this encouraging trend. Which of these things you’re getting better? What gives you that encouragement?