Masimo Corporation (MASI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning and welcome to the 44th annual Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference. I'm Jayson Bedford. I cover the MedTech sector here at RayJay. And it's really a privilege to have with us Masimo. With us, we have Eli Kammerman, VP of IR. Mike is on some sort of secret mission, right? Eli? So with that, I'm going to pass it off to Eli. Thank you.

Thanks, Jayson, and thanks to Raymond James for inviting us to present here today. I'm going to start out, as you see me. Unfortunately, I had a small mishap with my regular glasses on the way out here. So for my presentation, so I can see my slides, I'm going to be wearing these sunglasses, which, in fact, are prescription glasses. So please forgive the lack of eye contact. All right. Okay. First, take note of our safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements as well as non-GAAP financial measures as is typical. All right. Here's a profile of Masimo. We are a medical device and consumer products company. We expect our revenues this year to be between $2.4 billion and $2.5 billion. Net split, about 60% healthcare, 40% non-health care. We are addressing some very large market opportunities amounting to $170 billion in total. And the bulk of that is in the new consumer health space that we have a significant strategic initiative to target now. As you can see in those pie charts, our healthcare revenues are expected to grow at 9% to 11% over the next 4 years, while our consumer business, which is largely home audio and hearables is expected to grow at 4% to 6% over the next 4 years. All right. You can see our mission statement at the bottom. It's to improve life, improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care and take non-invasive monitoring to new sites and new applications. That mission statement does encompass both our medical product, healthcare segment as well as our non-healthcare segment. The way we fulfill this mission is through the 4 steps you see above. We've got a proven track record of innovation that has led to a dominant market position in the pulse oximetry product category. We've got a very robust product portfolio in patient monitoring and a full pipeline of upcoming products in both healthcare and non-healthcare that will fuel growth over the long term. We've been scaling and integrating our platform to capture the consumer health opportunity, which involves the application of our core medical technologies to new applications outside of the hospital, mainly in the home setting. And lastly, we expect to drive sustainable revenue growth by capturing significant market share in these new markets that we're targeting as well as consistently gaining share in the medical markets we serve in the professional healthcare area. Now there's been a lot of questions about our move into the consumer health area. On this slide, you can see what the rationale was for the large acquisition we executed last year, purchasing a business called Sound United, which manages some very prestigious brands in the high-end audio world. That acquisition was done for $1 billion, which we viewed as very reasonable, about 1x revenue and 8x EBITDA. And what it did was provide us with a very workable pathway to maximize the potential of the internally developed consumer health products that we've been working on for years. We've invested tens of millions of dollars in these products. And we wanted to have a good route to market with the right resources to maximize the potential for these new launches. And as you can see, we gained access to some very important assets with this acquisition. First, global distribution access. We've got retail brick-and-mortar as well as direct-to-consumer online pathways now for these new products that we'll be launching. In addition, we got a very competent sales and marketing team with expertise in promoting new innovations to consumers. And lastly, we also got some core technologies that we see as having great potential for combining with our hardware and software to make combination products that have increased value for consumer health purposes. On this slide, you can see the value of the different markets that we're addressing today, initially just $9 billion in the core hospital monitoring market. Now we've multiplied that by 20x and looking at some of these consumer markets that I'm talking about, the core business at Sound United involving audio equipment, amplifiers, speakers is only $6 billion. But with our new initiative, we're looking at targeting another $150 billion in potential market size. A lot of that is in the hearables area, earbuds, headphones, optimized for both music as well as conversation to exploit the new over-the-counter hearing opportunity, recently approved by the FDA and then telemonitoring, bringing monitoring technology into the home setting for both short-term and long-term monitoring of patients with various conditions. On this slide, you can see the major product types that we're selling to consumer -- I'm sorry, to the professional -- to the professional healthcare audiences that we address mostly in hospitals. Our core business in pulse oximetry accounts for about 80% of total sales. And then the remaining 20% involves other types of monitoring technologies, the most prominent of which is our rainbow technology, which is an advanced type of sensor that can monitor things in addition to blood oxygen. With rainbow, we can measure the total amount of hemoglobin in blood as well as things like carbon monoxide in the blood. While our core business is set to grow at 6% to 8% per year, which is double the market growth rate for pulse oximetry. The remaining 20% of sales is growing at 10% to 20% per year as we gain market share even faster in those categories. So you can see that our core business is quite healthy, and we've got a long runway for sustaining that growth. Our biggest franchise in pulse oximetry serves 200 million patients a year. That's for both disposable as well as reusable sensors. Most frequently, the fingertip sensors that you see that either taped to the finger or look like little close pins that clamp on to the end of the finger. We are in 9 of the 10 top hospitals with our technology and have a very prominent share, especially in the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit, where our differentiated technology is most valuable for reducing false alarms by eliminating distortion effects from body motion, mainly movement of the arms and legs for neonates and incubators. Here are some illustrations of the different types of monitoring technology we sell today, both hardware and software. On the far left and on the far right, you can see 2 examples of the advanced software we sell, UniView and UniView: 60 are part of our hospital automation portfolio. And what hospital automation is the capture, transmission, display and analysis of all the information coming from all the devices around the patient, no matter what they are. So in that UniView display, you see a consolidated presentation of all the different values from different types of devices around the patient. That's a very user-friendly format that makes it easy for all the clinicians around the operating table to see the status of the patient, all at the same time, so everyone's on the same page. Over on the far right, you see our latest innovation, the sepsis index. This is an advanced algorithm that looks at a combination of vital signs to identify the risk of a patient developing sepsis which is one of the most frequent illnesses that occur in hospitals apart from the reason the person goes to the hospital. With the sepsis index, the value is that you could flag this symptoms set early, potentially allowing a doctor to administer antibiotics earlier than usual and avoid a critical episode where a patient goes into distress. Then on the bottom right, you'll see an example of our wearable technology. The system on the man in the photograph is known as Radius VSM. VSM stands for vital signs monitor. And that is a combination product that measures heart rate, blood oxygen level, respiration rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram all from one wearable device set that lets a person walk around while they're in the hospital or be measured during a standard physical exam. We're now moving into the home setting, exploiting the telehealth and telemonitoring opportunity. We think we're very well positioned to do that and to target different types of patients with our technology. Firstly, we've got the hospital, the home groups, people who are undergoing a long-term recovery from a highly invasive surgery as well as people making routine recoveries from minimally invasive surgery. In the chronic care area, we think there's a good case to be made for continuous monitoring for people with chronic diseases like congestive heart failure, COPD or hypertension. And then finally, for people with acute episodes of sickness, we think that our spot check technology will be especially valuable in helping patients and possibly their physicians determine if the condition is getting worse or improving. Here's an example of our wearable technology. This is our first-generation watch known as W1. It's a continuous vital signs monitor that's worn on the wrist. It measures blood oxygen through pulse oximetry technology. It also measures heart rate, respiration rate, does step counting and has one very differentiated measurement known as the hydration index. This is a useful measurement for athletes, exercise enthusiasts as well as for people in the hospital who are recovering from various heart ailments and frequently are overly hydrated. The W1 watch is available for sale on a D2C basis, direct-to-consumer basis today through our website, but we are awaiting 510(k) clearance for this product which will allow it to become a B2B product, sold to hospitals and payers for management of patients with chronic diseases like CHF or COPD. The idea being that by flagging deterioration early, you can avoid the hospitalization episode and save a lot of money for the system. Now moving to our consumer health and audio business. We intend to fully leverage the various assets that we acquired with Sound United. In addition to a large group of engineers, we also got multiple manufacturing facilities located in Vietnam, China and the U.K. And as I mentioned, a highly competent and quite sizable team of sales and marketing experts in the consumer area. One of the important technology assets that we got with the acquisition was a software module known as HEOS that's illustrated in the bottom left of the slide here. It allows for a connected ecosystem. HEOS is a software module designed to transmit data in 2 directions. Today, it's being used strictly for entertainment purposes, for streaming music. We intend to use HEOS to stream healthcare data from the home up into the cloud, into a portal, so that doctors and nurses can check in on a patient periodically to see if they're okay or if maybe they're showing signs of deterioration. And finally, the other large part of the value channel access 20,000 points of retail distribution around the world. A large number of those are small mom-and-pop style installers for a home audio entertainment systems. But that also provides us with access for getting the hospital-at-home type setup installed, whereby the wearable technology will stream the data through the home entertainment system using that HEOS module I just described. We've got a very sophisticated approach to segmenting the various markets that we'll be targeting with our wearable technology. As you can see on the slide, the first audience is infants. We've got a new baby monitor coming out in the next few months. That will be targeting this group. And we've got very high expectations for that product based on its competitive positioning. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, we think our technology can be used for people recovering from a serious illness or from surgery and our wearables will also target exercise enthusiasts as well as lead athletes. The new baby monitor is called STORK, and there, we've identified a very sizable market opportunity and one that's ripe for exploitation by a company with superior vital signs monitoring technology, like Masimo. We think our highly accurate high-fidelity measurements will be especially valuable for parents who are concerned about the well-being of their children in the neonate and infant stage and exploiting this technology will allow us to build relationships with this audience for future sales of other wearable technologies. We're going to have a very full featured product for STORK in addition to the typical vital signs of heart rate and respiration rate, we're also looking at blood oxygen levels through our core technology as well as continuous temperature measurement. That feature set will be highly differentiated against the other baby monitors that are out there, and we think we can rapidly gain share with a combination of product features and channel access brought through the acquisition in the consumer products area. In the wearables category, our W1 watch and our next-generation watch known as Freedom will also exploit our core technology and target a very large market estimated at $50 billion today. There, again, our technology will give the most accurate measurements and one important feature of that is our ability to get an accurate reading even when the person is moving around. This is quite valuable for somebody who's doing exercise and wants to calibrate the intensity of their exercise routine to drive their blood oxygen to the lowest level possible to improve endurance by being able to get a reading while they're exercising, they won't have to stop and suffer through a partial recovery, giving a reading, which really won't be that meaningful. So with our wearable technology, an athlete can simulate altitude training by pushing themselves to the limit. Lastly, on the wearable, the hydration index is also an important measurement. Hydration being a critical factor in optimal athletic performance. Now moving to our home audio business. You can see that we've got some of the most respected brands in the world under management now. Bowers & Wilkins, Denon and Marantz, all considered luxury brands and then the mass premium brand known as Polk. We're leveraging these brands to introduce next-generation products that incorporate some Masimo healthcare developed technologies. The first one would be earbuds that incorporate AAT, adaptive acoustic technology. This is a highly advanced way to calibrate the equalizer settings on earbuds for optimal music listening experience. The AAT technology involves sending a sound signal into the ear, measuring the reflection of that signal and then calibrating the sound spectrum to compensate for any hearing deficiencies that a person might have. This is a problem that typically plagues people as they get older, past age 40, especially if they've attended many rock concerts, high-frequency sounds being the most frequent deficiency. So the AAT earbuds coming out around midyear under the Denon brand name are something that will be highly differentiated. Those earbuds were tested out at our Investor Day in December at our headquarters in Irvine by investors and the response we heard was universally positive. It's a very superior way of optimizing the listening experience. Okay. Moving to our financial overview and outlook. Here are some figures showing the performance of the business pre Sound United acquisition, so the healthcare business only. And as you can see, we achieved a 14% compound annual growth rate for revenues which nicely exceeded our guidance for long-term growth of 8% to 10%. At the same time, we extracted significant leverage from the business, improving operating margin by over 5 percentage points which helped to drive EPS growth to 23% for that 4-year period. Now moving to our guidance for 2023. You can see we expect to see constant currency revenue growth of 6% to 8%, with revenues getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.45 billion. And our long-term growth target for consolidated revenues is 7% to 9%. On operating profit, we're looking for $400 million to $405 million. That's about 10% growth this year and our long-term target for operating profit is 10% to 12%. We are managing our business today to maximize operating profit dollars, and that is a slightly new strategy for the company. We had been managing it to maximize operating margin when it was a healthcare only business. Now that we've expanded into all these new markets, our main objective is to grow the business as large as possible. For EPS this year, we're looking for $4.70 to $4.80. And that is on a reported basis, a relatively modest increase against our 2022 earnings mainly because we now have a significant interest expense associated with the acquisition financing as well as debt incurred to fund a large-scale share repurchase last year. So that wraps up the Masimo story, and I'll be glad to take some questions from Jayson now.

Thanks, Eli. And hopefully, you'll keep the glasses on because you look like a rock star up there. I guess just to play devil's advocate a little bit. What would you say to the skeptics out there that would say, hey, the Masimo-based business is tapped out, and this is why you had to do Sound United?

Well, the first thing I would say is look at our growth expectations for the base business. It's definitely not tapped out. We see long-term growth potential of 9% to 10% for the core professional health business. And we see significant upside in market share as we continue to gain share in pulse oximetry at a pace of about 2 percentage points a year. So our move into consumer health was really to exploit the full value of our core technologies by putting them into more applications in more settings.

Okay. There's some concern out there that in funding all of these initiatives, you're going to hurt the profitability. And so I guess, why shouldn't this be a concern for investors out there?

Yes, sure. For funding the initiatives in the consumer health area, we've put guardrails on the spending. For this year, our guidance is for 1 percentage point of consolidated sales to be dedicated to the combination of collaborative R&D for new product development as well as marketing and promotion. That amounts to about $25 million for this year. So we've got a very disciplined budget process. Those expectations are clearly communicated. And going further out in time, our spending for marketing and promotion will be adjusted based on the returns that we're seeing in real time. If a strategy is working, we'll increase the spending. Once again, with the focus being to drive the profits for the company as large as possible. We're not managing to margins. We're managing to operating profit overall.

The pipeline is very active, more than most in MedTech. When you look at the next 3 to 5 years, which product in the pipeline do you think will be the biggest revenue contributor?

Well, putting aside the large contribution we get from our pulse oximetry business, which is 80% of this 60% of healthcare sales, we've got very positive expectations for the new STORK baby monitor, which should be coming out within the next 3 months. There, we're looking at a significant market opportunity of $1.5 billion, about 1/3 of that is in the smart monitor category, which involves the integration of an app with the monitor. And we have some good benchmarks out there. The main player in the smart baby monitor category is now achieving sales at a run rate of about $80 million a year, and at their peak, they were at a run rate of $120 million a year. So those are near-term targets for us over the next 2 to 3 years. And that is something that's imminent. The next product that we have very high expectations for is our second-generation watch, the smart watch that we call Freedom. That will be a watch that integrates the Android operating system. It will be quite a large step-up from the basic W1 vital signs watch we have, and it will be targeted for both consumer as well as healthcare audiences.

And remind me, are those both products in the healthcare bucket?

Yes, all of the consumer health products will have revenues classed in the healthcare segment, and that's because they all use Masimo core technologies. So the non-healthcare segment will remain a pure audio.

Okay. Because -- when I think about the long-range plan that you laid out back in December, I think the assumed healthcare growth was 9% to 11%, including 1% from new products, which that basically gets to, I don't know, $350 million, $400 million in cumulative revenue, maybe a little over $100 million exiting year 5 and so it doesn't seem like the long-range targets really fully capture the potential of this pipeline.

Well, the long-range targets have a lot of variables in them that you must consider as you're trying to make a forecast. Firstly, we've got variations in launch timing related to factors that are not fully under our control like FDA clearance dates. We've got 2 products pending in front of the FDA now, the 510(k) clearance for the W1 watch that will facilitate B2B sales, we're hopeful that will happen in the next 3 to 6 months, but there's no guarantees where the FDA is concerned. The STORK baby monitor will also have its strongest positioning when it gets 510(k) clearance. There, again, we're hoping for something in the next 3 to 6 months, but we do intend to launch STORK even without the 510(k) clearance. So there are 2 variables. The other variables, of course, are negotiating large-scale contracts with hospitals and payers for the wearables. So what we've put out there in terms of revenue expectations really represent a base case. We feel that significant upside exists, but we don't want to commit to that at this early stage.

And maybe just last question. You mentioned the hearables and with the AAT technology, that's a midyear launch, which I don't remember if there was a time line before that. But is that a full-scale launch midyear? And there's no regulatory approval necessary, correct?

Right. That's strictly a consumer product designed for the music listening audience. And that will go through the traditional retail channels as well as D2C through the Denon website. So anywhere you see Denon headphones and earbuds sold, you will see the AAT version of Denon earbuds.

Right. I think with that, we're at our bottom of the hour here. So thank you, Eli. We'll see you downstairs in [ Amarante 1. ] Thanks.

Thanks, Jayson.