Cardinal Health, Inc. 2026 Global Healthcare Conference
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Good morning, everyone. My name's Eric Coldwell. Obviously cover a number of healthcare names, with Baird. Been with Baird quite a long time and not as long as I've covered the pharmaceutical wholesaling space, which is obviously a lot more than that today. But it's been a pretty amazing handful of years here and- I agree.
I've said this several times and maybe blowing smoke, but my favorite management team at Cardinal in my lifetime, and I continue to enjoy having you guys at events, hopefully many years to come.
Pleased to be here. Thank you for being here.
So of course, we have Jason Hollar today, and David Frost wants to, NIR wants to make a quick comment before we get started.
Just a quick comment. Yeah.
Then we're going to jump straight into Q&A. If you guys want to send questions up to the front, I'll happily take those on the iPad. Otherwise, I have, believe me, more than enough.
You do. Okay. Yeah. Quite a stack there.
Yes. Just as a little bit of housekeeping, we will be making forward-looking statements today, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied. For a description of these factors, please review our SEC filings, which can be found on our investor relations website at ir.cardinalhealth.com.
Thanks. Thank you, David. Okay.
Bit of a warm-up here. Soften you up before the hard ones.
Sure. All right. You just provided fiscal 2027 guidance.
You absolutely crushed last year, more than $2 of upside versus the original midpoint. Yet on a normalized basis, you still see earnings growth at or above the LRP. Against a tough comp, against a massive upside year, more incredible strength. I am guessing that you weren't planning on beating last year by over 20% all year long. Talk to us about the three or four biggest upside drivers and which of those are sustainable versus which were a bit more transitory, because that will lead to some of the follow-ons regarding the fiscal 2027 outlook.
Yeah. Thanks again, Eric, for having us here, and thank you all for attending. It may sound like a simple softball type of question up front. It's actually a little challenging to answer because it's hard to boil it down to just three or four things, because I think that's the real testament of a great management team, a great business, a great industry, is the breadth and the depth of the activities and the opportunities that we see in front of us. When you think about that over-performance in 2026, it was every one of our five operating segments performed incredibly well. Every single one of them had earnings growth of at least double digits, irrespective of the M&A. They each had some really great cash flow, which was another great story for us this last year.
And we have recently increased our long-range targets for the pharma business in the last investor day, and we are forecasting for and guiding for growth to be a little bit above even that- Yeah type of range.
So we have raised the bar on ourselves. I do get the point that that is lower growth, still strong growth, but lower growth than we saw last year. So the reasons why the key differentiation there. Let's break it all apart so we have that breadth of each of these five businesses doing really well. Within each of these businesses, I think it's important to think about the stuff we can control and the things that we have more difficulty controlling, like volume, utilization. That's been very constructive, very strong. I like the word constructive because just having the volume by itself doesn't mean you're going to have a great result, though. And we've seen that in the past.
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