Elanco Animal Health Incorporated ($ELAN)

My name is Brandon Vazquez. Thank you for joining us. I cover medical devices and animal health here for William Blair. I am required to inform you that if you want a complete list of disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. I'm excited to have Elanco with us here. We have Jeff Simmons, CEO; and Bobby Modi, the U.S. Pet Health VP. And I'm going to hand it over to them. They're going to give us a corporate presentation, and then we are going to breakout room Adler after, and I'll remind you at the end again, but thanks.

Thanks, Brandon. All right. Good afternoon. I look forward to Bobby and I sharing a lot about our company. And I'll point also to December 9, we had an investor conference. We'll show a few of those highlights as well, but really laid out the next 3 years. I think the best place to start for the company is to really this slide, which -- it's our 71st year as a company. We're a spinout of Eli Lilly. I think we're in a very compelling durable industry of animal health. I'll put a little case for that together. We're in the midst of 3 years of growth and just finished Q1, which we've said is really the best quarter we've had since our IPO in 2018. And this just sets up a little bit of some of the algorithm that we put out from now for the next 3 years, which is really looking at a mid-single-digit company at the top line, driven by innovation. We've seen, and I'll show you, we've got a basket of blockbuster innovations in the biggest markets, both Pet and Farm. And right now, we're expecting about $1.2 billion. We've raised that guidance in Q1 from the basket of innovation, with a pipeline of $2 billion, 15 candidates in our pipeline, with another 5 to 6 blockbuster products coming as well. And then leverage that will come on our bottom line of high single-digit EBITDA, low double-digit EPS and generating about $1 billion of cash flow over the next 3 years. So we're a different company. Since the IPO, we're in the position of strength that we've been targeting, 3 years of high-quality growth. And again, consistent, durable, we think most compelling value proposition in Elanco inside of a very durable Animal Health business. I'll just kind of follow a couple of the kind of key what we think pillars around how and why Elanco will win. I start with the industry itself. This being a growth conference at a time that's quite dynamic in our world I've been 37 years in animal health inside of Lilly and then as a spinout. And I would say in this slide, we try to capture this $42 billion industry that we think in the next decade is headed to $60 billion. And here's what I think is the best of some of the industries that we come from. First, it is pharma-like. We are regulated, FDA, EPA, high bars, high cost of capital to get into manufacturing and R&D. Sourcing the R&D. There's really 4 major players in the industry. But different than pharma, I was said as an Executive Officer of Lilly for 10 years is what's different is we also are CPG-like. There's brand loyalty, pet owners, farmers and veterinarians are very loyal to their brands. So we've got brands like Advantage on the Pet side or Rumensin on the Farm side that are 40, 50 years old, still growing, with life cycle management because of that loyalty of our customer base. And then lastly is it's very value-oriented. Vet clinics, pet owners and even farmers, you need to have that interface with the customer, and you need to be able to have the sophistication and the services to be able to reach. And that's why we're in over 90 countries both on the Farm and the Pet side. So that kind of creates this durable $42 billion industry that's going to grow close to $20 billion. What I would tell you is we play in the big markets. This is where the markets are when you start to look at the projections for 2030. The good news about Elanco even relative to maybe competition is we are under-indexed in some of the biggest markets with very compelling differentiated innovation. So on the Pet side, you've got a market in parasiticides today, $6 billion to $7 billion headed to $10 billion. You've got a derm market, $2 billion, the itching dog headed to $3 billion. And then you go down through biologicals is also important pain as well. And this is where our pipeline is geared right now. So we don't need to create markets or going into markets that are very large today, and differentiated. On the Farm side, in the U.S., we're #1 in cattle, poultry and pigs. We're the #2 farm animal player. And you can see these markets, again, protein, I'll talk about here in a minute, is actually experiencing a revolution. And actually, they're expecting this year alone, U.S. protein production will grow 5% alone, just in animal numbers and size. So this is a little bit of the trends. I kind of say the 2 Ps that drive our markets are pets and protein. On Pet, you see the humanization of pets. And right now, about 7 out of 10 homes have a pet in America. But when you look at Brazil and China and others, it's only 2 or 3 out of 10. 70% of new puppies today are international. So this market is globalizing. But underneath it, and Bobby is going to double down on pets because there's been a lot of discussion about the opportunities and maybe even the dynamics of this, but convenience drives compliance. Today, we're seeing a high percentage as we say 40% of pet care today is delivered to a door or on a subscription and spending goes up when that happens. And that convenience we like is 12 pills a year. Typically, our industry has been 6 or 7 a year. That compliance is a great market growth opportunity. Willingness to spend continues to be very high, and I'll leave that to Bobby to talk a lot about, and again, the globalization of this industry. On the protein side, I stood in front of a lot of groups 5 years ago, and they said, boy, the impossible burger and meatless Mondays are we going to have meat? It has truly been a cycle that has totally changed. From GLP use today, we're seeing 30% to 50% more protein being consumed by GLP users to the changed dietary guidelines to even an aging population. At the end of this decade, we'll have 25% more people over 60 and that muscle retention is really driving protein use. And we're seeing dairy win, poultry win, even with a shortage of beef, the international markets, grass-fed beef and pigs are growing as well. So we're set up well. This is what's going to drive this industry's $20 million of growth -- $20 billion of growth. And we kind of -- we're in a very purposeful industry. We say, hey, we touch every life every day driven by, hey, in Elanco, we believe in making animals' lives better, makes life better. And that's driven, we think, a durability of an industry, 30 years in a row, this industry has grown consistently mid-single digit, a nice blend between volume and price. Elanco has been very intentional since becoming an IPO to build a durable business. I would really focus to the far right. We've really worked really hard with the Bayer acquisition and Kindred and others to be able to say this is exactly where we want to be, and we're a little different than our competition. We like the mix half-and-half, protein and pets. And international and U.S. And that's really set us up well, we believe, for the rest of the decade to really grow our leadership. We're in the countries we need to be in, and again, well positioned. We're #1 in pet retail, that's 1/3 of the pet owners that actually go OTC. We're in most 1 or 2 in farm animal, and we're the leaders right now in vet clinics with innovation and innovation growth. This has been our journey since the IPO. One was the standup, the separation and then the acquisition of Bayer, which took money. It did lever us up but it allowed us to get the mix that I just showed you on the last chart and the scale, our R&D budgets went from $210 million, $220 million to now we're nearing $400 million revenue, so -- or excuse me, R&D spend, which has really given us the leverage to be able to bring the innovation to the market that I'll show. We then really double down a little bit like Lilly, a page out of their playbook to really focus on innovation. Here's a company in 70 years, had 6, 7 blockbusters and we got 6 more in the last 3 years with a lot of runway for growth. And those blockbusters have great margin opportunity. So you've heard earnings calls from us the last 3 years, it's been very simple. Our entire organization is focused on 3 things: growth, high-quality, industry-leading growth, which is we're achieving, innovation, record innovation that will drive that growth and cash. And I'll just to kind of double down on that. This strategy, IPP, I would really focus on the biggest one that is driving the multiples in this industry, a consistent flow of high-impact innovation, not having an air pocket. You want to have that consistent flow and it doesn't need to be in one market. We like to see it between Farm and Pet, and international and U.S., and I'll show just briefly that. And then your portfolio is consistently every portfolio getting a little better, a little stronger as we go. And then we brought in a new CFO, Bob, that's here with us today and will be part of the Q&A where we really doubled down to say we also want a productivity agenda and we've launched Elanco Ascend. So let me just hit each 1 of these 3 priorities quickly, and I'll turn it over to Bobby. So first is just our growth rates. And you can see that we've focused heavily on just kind of a very increased focus of quality of growth. We hit 10% in Q1 and we increased our mid-single-digit kind of 4% to 6%. We're now projecting 5% to 7% for the rest of this year. So the quality of growth is increasing. And it's driven really by innovation. These are the big 6 products that we have talked about relative to the size of them. And really, you can see our innovation growth is a nice blend, but we've increased that substantially. We came into this year at about $300 million of growth. We've raised that guidance. And I'll just -- Bobby will talk some about Credelio Quattro, that's our parasiticide in a $1.5 billion market, Zenrelia in a $2 billion derm market, and we're launching a second derm product, Befrena. Those are going to be the big drivers. But even in the cattle market, where the cattle numbers you've heard about are slowing, we have a product Experior that's now exceeded $200 million with a $350 million runway that's really created a market to where you can actually get quality of meat, the size of the growth of numbers of days to actually get more protein on less head and also reduce ammonia. So we've the first FDA product that had an environmental claim, which still matters a lot to the meat and milk companies. So we see, if you look at, all right, how do we sustain growth through the rest of the algorithm 2028 and into the rest of the decade, we've committed these blockbusters will double the big 6, between now and 2028, and we're well on that track and have a lot of momentum here in 2026. And then I'll share a little bit the next wave of innovation, 15 key products in the pipeline, and we're committing to another 5 to 6 in the next 5 years. And a base business that last quarter grew, but we're kind of saying we'll be stable, plus or minus low single digit on the base business. This is what excites me the most. In 37 years of animal health and even other companies in the past that have created a lot of value, it's a lot about the pipeline. Ellen de Brabander has got, I think, the best team in the industry, a lot of stability, and we've really created an engine that is creating a lot of innovation. So we've got the 6 innovations I just talked about, $1 billion of value. We have another $2 billion in the 15 candidates, and we are committing to 5 to 6 more in this window of '26 to '31, and then the next, next wave. And we've shared in our Investor Day a lot of detail about these. What I would say is, they're accretive to margin. They only stay in our pipeline if we believe they're best-in-class or first-in-class. And we do believe that most all of these are in already created markets. We don't need to go out and create a new obesity market or a CKD, not that we're not chasing those, but we see these as real opportunities to drive quality growth. The third priority is cash and we've delevered 2 full turns in the last 2 years. We're very focused on this. We've committed that we will be under the 3x levered by 2027. We're well on that track, and we actually improved our guide by committing to 3.1 to 3.0 by the end of this year. And then this is just the initiative that Bob, our CFO, has really committed, and we're working across the company on Elanco Ascend is company-wide productivity from AI to procurement, to gross to net, to 5,000 projects across the company where everyone is incented to drive productivity at the same time we're driving record growth. This is my last slide, which is really just highlighting Q1 and the durability of our business. And I would -- why I want to really segue now to Bobby is there's been questions about, hey, how durable is this market? Is that pet owner being hit a little bit with the sensitivity of the marketplace and the economy. And we want to be very clear today and spend a little time doubling down on this because I think our Q1 results exceeding expectations on revenue, EBITDA and EPS, raising our innovation, improving our cash flow. But probably most importantly is our guidance for the rest of the year highlights that U.S. Pet Health, especially, the marketing question, is actually going to grow high single digit, low double digit and the durability, we believe, of the industry and our business is well suited. So I thought because this has probably been the most highest question in our industry in quite some time. I wanted to just spend a little time and have Bobby Modi. Bobby has come from the CPG industry and has really led our U.S. Pet business for quite some time now to just take a double-click on U.S. Pet Health. Bobby?

Thanks, Jeff. Good afternoon. I'm Bobby Modi. I have the privilege of leading our U.S. Pet Health business. And I'm going to talk a little bit about Elanco's U.S. Pet Health business. I'm going to talk about the drivers of growth. And then I'm going to address a little bit of the market dynamics that we see [ playing on ] in the U.S. Pet Health market. So first, we're about $1.3 billion market. We represent just around 30% of Elanco sales. And much like total Elanco, we have a very diversified business. Our channel diversity, for example, allows us to reach over 1/3 of pet parents that don't visit the veterinarian on a regular basis. And second, different than many of our competitors we play in all 4 of the major medical spaces in animal health. And in the last 4 years, we have launched differentiated innovation in all of these spaces. With the upcoming launch of our IL-31 monoclonal antibody, Befrena, we'll be one of two animal health companies with a comprehensive portfolio to address the needs of veterinarians and pet parents. And this makes us very attractive to vet clinics, but specifically makes us attractive to corporate clinics. And in 2025, we grew with 90% of our corporate partners compare that to only growing with 13% of our corporate partners in 2024. And in Q1 of 2026, our corporate business grew by 12% over 2x the average of our U.S. Pet Health growth rate going forward. And we expect this trend to continue to accelerate. Now let me talk to you a little bit about the growth drivers on our Pet Health business. First is Credelio Quattro. And we are incredibly pleased with the performance of Credelio Quattro. It's defying all archetypes of a third-to-market launch, and it's actually behaving like best medicine. And we believe it's behaving like best medicine because there are 4 degrees of differentiation. The first degree is broadest coverage. The second degree of differentiation is speed of kill with ticks, which is especially important as you think about disease transmission. The third degree of differentiation is heartworm coverage after 1 month versus some other competitors that require 6 months. And the fourth degree of differentiation is palatability, which we know is important when you're trying to switch pet parents from one product to another product. And although Credelio Quattro was Elanco's fastest blockbuster in the company's history, we still believe there's plenty of upside. Three reasons why we believe there's upside. First, we're participating in a growing market. The broad-spectrum endecto market is $1.5 billion and grew 25% in 2025. And we look at 2026, it continues to grow, and we're poised to capitalize on that growth. Second, we have a significant opportunity to drive clinic penetration. We're only in 40% of the clinics in the U.S. today. And although I'm really pleased that we added 7 percentage points of penetration since our December Investor Day, we still have ample opportunity to get best medicine in all of the clinics in the U.S. And the third vector is share within the clinics. We grew our share within the clinics by 17 points from our December communication to Q1. And that's really driven by our direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns as well as our Puppy Index, which puts more -- which shows that we're putting more puppies on this product that will ultimately stay on it as adults. So although we're pleased with Credelio Quattro, we still think there's plenty of gas in the tank. Now let me talk about the second big parasiticide category, which is differentiated for Elanco. We have a leading share position in the OTC parasiticides category, which is over $1.1 billion. We've broken that category down into two segments: the premium space, which is roughly $750 million, which are leading brands like Seresto and K9 II and Advantage II play in. We have a clear market leadership position in that category, and we've continued to expand our share in that category over the last 3 years, driven by smart direct-to-consumer advertising, optimized pricing and new customer expansion, we recently brought on Costco in Q1 of 2026. But what I'm really excited about is the growth that we see in the value channel, which is almost a $400 million segment, which was a segment that Bayer Animal Health didn't play in at all. And over the last 3 years, we've added almost 4.5 share points of growth, and we continue to see that expand. And that growth has really been driven by taking premium brands and applying them to value formulas and bringing new products to Bayer to meet the needs of value consumers where those value consumers ultimately shop. And I was really pleased that in Q1 of 2026, we launched our first-ever value Collar for Dogs under the Advantage brand, and this innovation allowed us to bring on a top 8 retailer for us, Dollar General that really caters to the value consumer. Given our share position in the segment, we still see plenty of opportunity for growth and expansion in the OTC space. And then lastly, let me talk to you about the second largest space in U.S. Pet Health, which is the derm space. The derm market is $1.3 billion with strong growth. 90% of this market is actually broken down into two segments: JAK inhibitors and IL-31 monoclonal antibodies. Elanco launched its JAK inhibitor, Zenrelia in September of 2024 in the U.S. Since then, we've continued to see rapid sort of adoption and market share growth. We're actually in 50% -- over 50% of the clinics in the U.S., and we added 5,300 clinics since our September label update. We also grew our double-digit JAK share by 5 share points from Q4 to Q1. And we've also been pleased with the globalization of Zenrelia, where the label is different from the U.S., and we're seeing market leadership positions in countries like Brazil and expanding market share in Japan. And in Q1 of 2026, we were pleased to announce that Zenrelia reached global blockbuster status on a trailing 4-quarter basis. Now I want to shift your attention to the other 40% of the market, which is the IL-31 monoclonal antibody market. As I said earlier, we have just recently launched our IL-31 mAb, Befrena, appropriately named because it stops your dog's itch and allows it to be your friend again. We're launching it in a staged approach, and we've recently given it to veterinarians in our early experience program and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and very similar to Zenrelia, Befrena will be differentiated on efficacy, convenience and value. And based on the results of Zenrelia, we know that this is a winning formula for success. We look forward to continuing to scale the Befrena launch as supply improves over the back half of 2026. So I think you know that Elanco is poised to succeed and continue to take market share, largely based on our differentiated innovation assets but also because of our broad comprehensive portfolio. But now I want to take a moment and address a few sort of questions that we've been getting recently. The first question that people have been asking is, is the industry or the U.S. pet health market is still growing? And the short answer is yes. The U.S. pet health market grew 5% in 2025, and it grew high single digits in the broad-spectrum parasiticide market and the derm market, double digits in the broad-spectrum parasiticide market and high single digits in the derm market. And yes, Q1 in 2026 was off to a sluggish start, largely driven by weather-related events in January and February that shut down clinics in various parts of the country. But we've seen March and April rebound. And we've seen year-to-date dispensed to consumers, both the derm market and the parasiticide market showing positive growth. We continue to expect this market to grow low single digits to mid-single digits this year and long term return back to mid-single digits. Now let's talk a little bit about the second question we often get is, given the macroeconomic uncertainty, is the pet owner still resilient? And the answer is absolutely yes. Most pet owners now think of pets as part of the family. In fact, almost half of pet owners said, they spend more on their pet's care than they do their own care. And if we look at recent survey data, almost 90% of pet parents said, they are not going to spend less on their pets care going forward. What we are seeing is how pet parents spend their money is changing and different. And we're actually seeing more pet parents shop omnichannel multiple channels, not just the vet clinic and moving that spend to subscription-based spending. And Elanco's omnichannel capabilities and our diversified portfolio allow us to meet that pet parent where he or she wants to shop. The third question I want to tackle is, is there a price race to the bottom? I know that's been a fear lately based on Elanco taking lots of market share in growing spaces. And the short answer is no. And let me explain a couple of things. First, both consumers and veterinarians have always proven that they are willing to pay for differentiated innovation that addresses unmet needs. And we've actually seen that play out in the marketplace. Second, as we've studied the industry, over the last 20 years, there's never been a major blockbuster product that's actually taken a price decrease in the marketplace. Third, Elanco actually took the largest price increase it has ever taken in the veterinary channel in January of 2026. Based on the differentiation of our Credelio Quattro brand and the differentiation of Zenrelia. And lastly, we've committed to price realization to accelerate in 2026 versus 2025. So what I want you to take away. Simple. First, the U.S. market is strong and the pet parent is resilient. And second, Elanco is poised to win. Our differentiated portfolio and our differentiated innovation assets plus a stable pipeline give us the ability to take market share and expand already growing marketplaces. In fact, in our Q1 earnings, we shared this slide, which where we committed to growth accelerating in the back half of the year based on continued innovation expansion, new launches and corporate account growth. We now see our U.S. Pet Health business delivering a full year revenue growth rate of high single digits. So I'll end where Jeff started. 2026 marks a new era for Elanco with a new financial algorithm. Organic revenue growth in the mid-single digits, adjusted EBITDA growth in the high single digits, adjusted EPS growth in low double digits, free cash flow over the next 3 years of over $1 billion in excess and a leverage ratio under 3x by 2027. I've never been more confident in our ability to reliably deliver growth in a consistent manner because we have the right plans, the right products and the right team to do so. Thank you for your time. We look forward to taking questions.

Okay. Thanks, everybody. We'll head up to the Adler room for the breakout...