Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Abbott's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be able to listen only until the question and answer portion of this call. During the question and answer session, you will be able to ask your question by pressing the star 11 keys on your touchstone phone. This call is being recorded by Abbott. With the exception of any participants' questions asked during the question and answer session, the entire call, including the question and answer session, is material copyrighted by Abbott. It cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without Abbott's Express written permission. I would now like to introduce Mr. Mike Camilla, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Robert Ford, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Phil Boudreaux, Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer. Robert and Phil will provide opening remarks. Following their comments, we'll take your questions. Before we get started, some statements made today may be forward-looking for purposes of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the expected financial results for 2026. Advert cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Economic, competitive, governmental, technological, and other factors that may affect Abbott's operations are discussed in Item 1A, Risk Factors, to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025. Abbott undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as a result of subsequent events or developments, except as required by law. On today's conference call, as in the past, non-GAAP financial measures will be used to help investors understand Abbott's ongoing business performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled with the comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings news release and regulatory filings from today, which are available on our website at abbott.com. Abbott has not provided the related GAAP financial measures on a forward-looking basis for the non-GAAP financial measures for which it is providing guidance because the company is unable to predict with reasonable certainty and without unreasonable effort the timing and impact of certain items, which could significantly impact Abbott's results in accordance with GAAP. Unless otherwise noted, our commentary on sales growth refers to comparable sales growth, which includes the prior and current year sales of Exact Sciences, a cancer diagnostics company that Abbott acquired on March 23, 2026. Our definition of comparable sales growth can be found on page two of our press release issued earlier today and a reconciliation table that contains data needed to calculate comparable sales growth can be found on page 13. With that, I will now turn the call.

Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Our results in the first quarter were aligned with our expectations for the start of the year. That included delivering adjusted earnings per share of $1.15 consistent with our guidance, despite absorbing the impact of earlier than planned financing costs related to our acquisition of exact sciences and a week of than expected respiratory season. Board also marked an important strategic milestone for Abbott with the completion of our acquisition of Exact Sciences. This acquisition adds a new high growth business to the Abbott portfolio for the strengthening our leadership position in diagnostics and expanding our presence into one of the fastest growing areas of healthcare, cancer diagnostics. As we communicate at the time of the acquisition announcement, we forecast the addition of Exact Sciences is to add approximately $3 billion of incremental sales in 2026 and accelerate Abbott's long-term sales growth rate. Before I summarize our first quarter results, I wanted to highlight a few pipeline achievements in our medical device business, and those include an earlier than planned approval and launch of two new PFA catheters, completion of patient enrollment in our Catalyst left atrial appendage device trial, initiation of development activities to bring an implantable extravascular ICD product to market, and the announcement of positive results from our randomized control trial, which demonstrated that people with type 2 diabetes on basal insulin therapy benefited from using Libre, including seeing reductions in HbA1c and increased time spent in healthy glucose range. In addition to these achievements, our teams are preparing to initiate patient enrollment in several important clinical trials in the second half of this year. These trials represent a unique opportunity that could position Abbott to bring a new wave of highly differentiated technologies to the market. This pipeline of new technologies includes a balloon expandable TAVR valve, a leadless conduction system pacing device that utilizes our revolutionary AVER leadless pacemaker, a mitral replacement valve developed following our acquisition of Cephia valve technologies, A peripheral IVL device developed following our acquisition of CSI, and a wearable continuous lactate monitoring sensor that will monitor presepsis following discharge from a hospital. Now I'll summarize our first quarter results before I turn the call over to Phil, and I'll start with diagnostics. Where sales increased 2% on a comparable basis in core lab diagnostics. Growth of 3% was driven by growth in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Sales of core lab diagnostic tests, which exclude capital equipment and digital health solutions, increased on both a year-over-year and sequential basis. And this is a trend that we expect to continue and drive higher growth in the second half of the year compared to the first half. In our rapid and molecular diagnostic business, sales declined 10%, reflecting lower demand for respiratory virus testing due to a much weaker respiratory season compared to last year. And in cancer diagnostics, sales grew 13% on a comparable basis driven by mid-teens growth of ColoGuard and high-teens growth in international markets. We're going to nutrition, where sales finished slightly ahead of our expectations for the As discussed on our January earnings call, results in the quarter reflect the impact of lower sales volumes compared to the prior year and the effect of strategic pricing actions implemented in the fourth quarter of 2025 with an objective of reaccelerating volume growth while we are still early in the transition back toward a more sustainable balance between price and volume driven growth i'm encouraged by the progress we're making early data indicates we are seeing the intended effect with volume growth beginning to follow our pricing actions we continue to expect that these pricing actions combined with the launch of several new products will result in growth improving over the course of the year turning to EPD our pharmaceutical business where sales increased 9% in the quarter growth was broad based across the markets we serve which included double-digit growth in several countries across Latin America and Asia Pacific regions demand in these markets continues to be supported by favorable long-term health care economic and demographic trends with a broad product offering across five therapeutic areas and an expanding biosimilars portfolio which includes several market-leading oncology therapies we are well positioned to serve the growing customer base in these markets and I'll wrap up with medical devices where sales grew eight and a half percent growth was led by strong performance in our cardiovascular device businesses this included double-digit growth in electrophysiology heart failure and rhythm management in In electrophysiology, growth of 13% included contributions from two pulse-fueled ablation catheter launches in a quarter. The launch of our Volt PFA catheter contributed to a growth of 14% in the U.S., and the launch of our TaktiFlex Duo catheter helped drive mid-teens growth in Europe. As we broaden the launch of both catheters, we expect growth in our electrophysiology business to accelerate. In rhythm management, sales grew 13%, making the third consecutive quarter that we have delivered double-digit growth and continued our track record of significantly outperforming the market. In heart failure, growth of 12% was driven by our market-leading portfolio of heart assist devices, which offer treatment for chronic and temporary conditions. In diabetes care, continuous glucose monitoring sales were $2 billion and grew 7.5%. Growth in the quarter reflects an impact from a delay in the renewal process related to an international tender. We also saw the expected impact from a challenging comparison to last year. This comparison relates to shelf restocking dynamics that occurred in the first half of 2025, a topic that we discussed on an earnings call last year. As we look forward to the second quarter, we expect CGM to return to double-digit growth. So in summary, our results in the quarter were in line with our expectations to start the year, we remain confident in our expectation for an acceleration in growth in the second half of the year, and we have clear visibility to the key drivers of that acceleration and are highly focused on executing on them. Those drivers include, first, executing our growth strategy in nutrition, which is underway and on track with our expectations. Second, we see a clear growth in both electrophysiology and core lab diagnostics, supported by best in class portfolios, new product launches, and improving market conditions. Third, we will continue our proven track record of delivering strong, sustainable performance in EPD and across our medical devices portfolio. And finally, we are successfully integrating Exact Sciences, which adds a compelling, high-growth business to the Abbott portfolio for the strength and our ability to deliver long-term sustainable growth.

And then I'll turn over the call to Phil. Of the March 23rd close of our acquisition of Exact Sciences, our first quarter financial results include the results of the Exact Sciences business from the close date through the end of the quarter. As Mike mentioned, our press release issued this morning provides sales growth in the quarter on a comparable basis, which includes the full quarter sales of Exact Sciences in both the prior and current year. Of comparable sales growth, our full year 2026 sales growth outlook of 6.5% to 7.5% is now on a comparable basis as well. The sales growth outlook includes the full year sales of Exact Sciences in both the prior and current year. For our previous full year adjusted earnings per share guidance range midpoint of $5.68, our new guidance range midpoint of $5.48 reflects $0.20 of dilution related to the Exact Sciences acquisition, consistent with our assumption at the time of the announced transaction. Turning to our first quarter results, sales increased 3.7% on a comparable basis and adjusted earnings per share of $1.15 grew 6% compared to the prior foreign exchange had a favorable year-over-year impact of 4% on first quarter sales. We saw the U.S. dollar weakened, which resulted in a favorable impact on sales compared to exchange rates at the time of our earnings call in January. Aspects of the P&L, the adjusted gross margin profile was 56.3 percent of sales, adjusted R&D was 6.7 percent of sales, and adjusted SG&A was 29.3 percent of sales. Based on current rates, we expect exchange to have a favorable impact of approximately 1 percent on full-year recorded sales. For the second quarter, we expect exchange to have relatively neutral impact on sales. For the second quarter, we forecast adjusted earnings per share of $1.25 to $1.31. With that, we'll now open the call for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. For optimal sound quality, we kindly ask that you use your handset instead of your speakerphone when asking your question. Again, that's star one one to ask a question, and please stand by. We compile our Q&A roster. And our first question will come from David Roman from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe I'll start with just the updated guidance, and I know you touched on some of this during the call, but maybe you could go into some further detail on firstly maybe you're just your guidance philosophy and your just thought process in establishing the revised outlook and then secondly just the extent to which the outlook is in your mind sort of fully de-risks and captures upside potential but also contemplates any downside unforeseen risks here yeah sure I mean I think the philosophy here David is I think that maybe there's a portion there that is you know we've included exact sciences into the history and our philosophy there has always been to

ensure that our investors have you know clear transparent detailed kind of breakdown of our performance we did that during COVID if you remember we always split out the COVID sales we got feedback that they really wanted to understand the underlying part of the business and the COVID part of the business when we did the acquisition of St. Jude you know the acquisition closed in the first quarter, and so we did the same approach there to fold in St. Jude into a kind of more comparable basis, and we just think it provides the investors really the most relevant growth rate, a growth rate that is of the new Abbott portfolio on a very kind of clean apples to apples basis. So I think that's the philosophy there. As it relates to the guidance, I think I think maybe the view there was just maybe a little bit of a conservative side here on, you know, some aspects that, you know, we felt in the first quarter. For example, if you look at the respiratory season, you know, we forecasted Q1 to be a relatively weak season compared to other seasons that we had seen in the past. And then that was even weaker than what we had forecasted. And I think as we've looked at, you know, other comparable, you know, healthcare businesses that we look at, like, for example, like OTC meds, which is a very good kind of triangulation there, you know, we're seeing also, you know, those types of businesses have, you know, kind of this year-over-year effect there. So, you know, one of the ways to think about it is like, okay, you have two parts in the year where you're going to have this effect. You have it, you know, at the beginning of the year and you have it at the end of the year. So one of the ways to think about it is, okay, we're going to make that lower respiratory season at the back end of the year, and then we would have to assume that you would have an above-average respiratory season, at least from a testing perspective. But I'm only going to find that out, you know, just before Thanksgiving. So I just thought it was prudent to say, you know what, we're not going to be able to make up, or I'll put it this way, I'm not going to forecast that we're going to make it up in Q4, this respiratory aspect. That doesn't mean we won't be ready. Obviously, you know our portfolio, and we know we've got the manufacturing, the capabilities, and the distribution to be able to do that. I just decided that I didn't think it was prudent to bake that into the forecast. The rest of the areas of the business, the sales growth out is very much in line with our January outlook. And if I go back to the way I described our year and the year progression, there's a couple key kind of blocks that really drive our growth throughout the year. I'd say the first block here is just, as I said in my comments, sustaining the growth of our medtech business and our pharma business. Medtech business, low double digits, our pharma business, above 7%. These are businesses that have consistently and reliably delivered this type of performance. And whether it's market conditions or new product launches in these businesses, we feel very good about our ability to be able to sustain that kind of performance the other bucket I would say the second bucket would probably be more okay trajectory train trajectory changing businesses and I put diagnostic especially our core lab business and nutrition into those buckets I think they're a little bit different though David I would say on our core lab business and we talked about this last year the impacts of China and the VVP and obviously COVID that was about a billion dollar headwind that we faced last year. Other parts of the business, geography, other parts of the platforms doing very well growth, and we continue to see that. So what I've seen over the last six months really gives me confidence that we're actually on very much either on track or slightly ahead of that recovery and our diagnostics and that growth trajectory change. And I think the teams there have done an incredible job in China and especially here in the U.S. too. I think the teams have done really good in terms of being able to capture market share. The nutrition transition, I think, is a little bit earlier on in that stage, but I still feel that what we're seeing right now, the decisions that we took, the timely decisions that we took in the middle of Q4, I think we're starting to see some of that activity right now in terms of being able to drive volume growth. It's still early. I can't declare, like, yes, it's done, but we're starting to see really good indications that the actions that we took and then combined with the new product launches that we're going to see that recovery and then the third bucket I would put on that list is just the integration of the exact sciences which adds you know a high growth business to the portfolio it's been performing true we'll talk about that also but I'd say those are the three kind of big drivers of our sales forecast and and those really haven't changed so the real thing here was just I'm not going to try and call what type of you know flu season you know we're going to have you know starting before Thanksgiving. But if the flu season is as aggressive as we've seen in other years, then we have the manufacturing, we have the distribution, we have the sales force, all of that in place to be able to do that. So hopefully that answers your question.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Robbie Marcus from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Oh, great. Good morning, and thanks for taking the question. Robert, maybe to follow up on David's question, I appreciate that comparable growth is a much more helpful metric, especially if we're looking out to the future and what the new Abbott will be doing on an underlying basis. But when I look at organic growth, which I think is what a lot of people pay attention to in the health of the Abbott business coming into the year before the acquisition, it looks to me like growth is moving from the six and a half to seven and a half guide on the fourth quarter call is something more like five, seven, five to six, seven, five. if we adjust out exact sciences and the lost royalty revenue. So it does look like there's a bit of deceleration in the prior organic AVID business. How are you thinking about managing that? How much is one time versus sustainable? And where do you see sort of the biggest pressure points and how you're addressing it? Appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm not sure I follow those numbers, though, Robbie. But I think what you're trying to get to is, hey, by putting exact sciences into a comparable basis, are there parts of the non-exact business that are underperforming? I'm assuming that's what you're trying to hint around. I would say as I said to David I think that if I'll put it this way if the business acquisition had closed after this call let's call it Q2 sometime in Q2 I think we probably would have done I think what you in the med tech space would usually expect is that you kind of keep it separate and then you kind of laugh at a year but then what you'll then ask me to do is to always every quarter reconcile between what the acquisition did the organic growth rate So I just felt that because it was early in the Q1, before this call, that we could roll it in on a comparable basis, and that would give our investors full visibility to the new Abbott with this addition of the exact sciences. And so, you know, I don't think that – I know that might involve a little bit more work for some of you guys in terms of your modeling and all that, but I think we try to make it very easy for you as part of our disclosures. Parts of the business that, you know, we're focusing on, I think I went through that in a fair amount of detail here. I mean, if you want to go to specific kind of parts of the portfolio, we could do. But I think I described that to David pretty clear here. I think the – but I'll repeat it if necessary. The device portfolio, the pharma portfolio, we still feel very strong about those growth rates. We're not backing off those. Obviously, there's opportunities to outperform in some of them. There are some more kind of challenging areas in others, whether it's market, whether it's competition. But overall, that combination, we feel very good about sustaining that. And then these trajectory-changing businesses, you know, like we discussed in diagnostics and core nutrition, I think we know what the issues were. We know what we're working on, and we're really focused on executing that. But if I take a step back here, I mean, I think ultimately, you know, the way our business is, we're a very diversified company we lay out all of the different businesses we break out even within sectors we break them out and be able to show the performance in that my view here is that yeah it would be great to have every single business beating all of all the street expectations unfortunately sometimes you're not going to have that I'm not going to say that never happens because it's happened before but sometimes it doesn't happen And I think the important thing there, Robbie, is that you have a collection of businesses that we feel are very attractive and that the combination, the sum of them, are able to hit our commitments and deliver on our financial commitments. So I take a view of, I look at each business individually, but we also look at it as a whole. And I think as a whole, the company is well set up for this year.

Thanks, Robert. I appreciate it.

Thank you. And our next question will come from Larry Beigelson from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. So, Robert, I wanted to ask about CGM. You know, we heard your comments about, you know, the CGM market or your business in Q1 and the expected acceleration in Q2. But, you know, the CGM prescription trends in the U.S. look weak. Can you talk about what's happening in the CGM market? You know, there's a concern that the current indications are saturated? And, you know, how are you thinking about, you know, Libre growth, you know, the rest of the year and longer term? And just lastly, remind us of the timing for type 2 non-insulin and the dual ketone sensor and the lactate sensor you mentioned. Sure. Listen, I think it's always important to look at weekly prescription data in one country. It's an important country, And the weekly prescription data is obviously great early indicators for the market, even though that auditing channel that you guys rely on to look at weekly prescription data doesn't capture the entire market. It's very different from pharma where you've got a lot of other segments of the market that are performing. So I think using TRX data to ultimately look at how the market is evolving and only using that is, I would caution, I think it's a little bit myopic. So let me take kind of a bigger view here, okay, Larry, in terms of how I think about the market, what's going on in the market, and the opportunities we have there. I'm very bullish on this market. If I look at the big picture here, I'm fairly bullish on the CGM market. As you know, Larry, I've always been, and I continue to be. If I look at our assessment of the amount of people that should be on a CGM on a global basis, we estimate between 70 to 80 million people on CGMs should be. And obviously, there are different types of patients in that number, but overall, 70 to 80 million people. I think the market today is around 10 to 12. So 10 to 12 million people. And again, you might think 78 is a lot, but there's about half a billion people with diabetes. So I felt that I've kind of narrowed it down quite a bit already. And even in that narrowed-down world, we're still very underpenetrated. And I think if you look back to – I'll speak for our growth trajectory because we've looked at this and we continue to look at it. I go back like 15 years. I look at quarterly revenue over 15 years. So let's call it, you know, whatever, 60 data points there. It's never always up to the right on a perfect 45 degree, okay? I know we love businesses that are like that, but it never is. There are periods, if you look, at least for us, there are periods where there's a little bit of modest growth, and modest growth I'd call like whatever, you know, 8% to 10%. And then it's followed by very long periods of strong, strong acceleration, teens, 20% kind of growth. And if you look at those acceleration periods, they're typically driven by different types of catalysts, either a reimbursement catalyst, a geographic expansion catalyst, a new product launch catalyst. And as I look at this market and I look at our position, I see a lot of catalysts still ahead of us in this market. If I think about reimbursement as a strong catalyst, you just mentioned one, type 2 non-insulin coverage. I expect proposed language of that coming soon. I can't tell you the exact month, Larry, and I'm not going to try and forecast what it is, when it is, but I know it's going to happen. And I know that it's going to add close to 10 million people that don't have coverage now that now will be able to have coverage. and that's obviously going to accelerate commercial coverage too so so I think that's that's one that I we've talked about I have not included in my guidance but it is a sweet spot for us in terms of our the channel our channel strength our promotional strength our reimbursement coverage there so so so I think that's a catalyst that's on the horizon here for us internationally I know we like to focus a lot on the US but internationally out of the top ten markets in the world only four have actually gone full-blown basal coverage you know so there are another six very large markets that are still in the process of not evaluating but going through the budget process the you know the the criteria process etc and what we've tried to do is obviously you know build way from a physician side but also from a patient advocacy we showed an RCT I talked about him opening comments at ATDD conference later this year which showed again in a randomized control trial not just using real-world evidence but randomized control trial that patients on basal do better with do better with Libre so so I look at those and there's so much opportunity still internationally and and even in the US so I don't think that the patient TAM is or anything like that, you're just going to have these little moments where growth modulates a little bit and then these next catalysts come in and they continue to drop. You've got 70 to 80 million people that can be on this product. And even if you look at a yearly revenue number that's lower than what we're seeing today because you've got different types of patient groups in that number, you're looking at $30, $35 billion TAM here that's available to us. And we're focused on that, Larry. We're focused on building competitive advantage to be able to be a leader in that space, whether it's product technology advantage, cost advantage, scale advantage, and we do very well there. And then if you think about kind of innovation as another catalyst, we have a couple that are on our way also for us too. We've got still committed to an expected approval of our dual analyte system in the second half of this year. That's going to open up about a million patients that we previously had had very little access to on the pump side. You're going to have about 5 million SGLT2 users that aren't using the product, which will now have the benefit of having continuous ketone monitoring. We're working on a Libre 5. I'm not going to get ahead of myself here, but our view here is always, okay, how do we continue to sustain our competitive advantage? And you do that through cost advantage, and you do that through product innovation. So I still feel very good about this market. And I'm looking at it from a much bigger picture than just, you know, weekly TRXs, which don't get me wrong, we look at it also. And we could see the trends, too. And there are obviously areas that we can do better. And we're working on that, too. But the bigger picture here is that we're very well positioned for what I believe is a very, very large kind of market.

All right. Thanks so much. Thank you. Our next question will come from Vijay Kumar from Evercore ISI.

Your line is open. hi Robert good morning and thank you for taking my question I guess maybe I'll stick to exact you know given that the deal is closed you know there's an asset which has done phenomenally well over the years you know doing mid-teens kind of growth you know just talk about that your plans for sustaining strong growth of Kologuard is there an international angle here for Kologuard in and sort of related to that trade when I look at the guidance you know comparable growth is now six and a half to seven and a half and we know it's actually strong faster is there some convolutism that's being perhaps being baked in the guidance you know could there be upside given exact just growing faster thank you sure listen I think the the integration is going very well.

So I think it starts with that, right? We've named Jake Orville as our new leader in that business. He previously led the screening business or the color guard business, and he's reporting directly to me. It's reported in our diagnostics kind of queue, but it's operating standalone and reports straight to me. I think right now we're very excited, and I know that the team is also very excited. I've had opportunities to field travel with reps. I've had opportunities to talk to physicians. And I'd say I'm very bullish about the ability to really accelerate this business. Sustaining Color Guard growth, I'll answer that, but let me just say when we looked at this strategically, Vijay, we really wanted to think about this not as a one product kind of deal but more as an opportunity to enter a space that is extremely exciting and very high growth so not just screening with Cologuard but therapy selection and MRD testing these are obviously areas that I know you know very well and they have great opportunities here so our goal in doing this is to actually be a leader across the entire cancer diagnostic span and we believe that Exact was definitely a kind of a beachhead building block for us to do that. And within that, obviously, ColoGuard is the key growth driver there. And I would say I think it's a very sustainable growth here for us for a couple reasons. One, the demand is still going to is high and it's continuing to increase. Right. So right now, if you look at it's a very underpenetrated right now. You've got 50 million Americans that are not up to date with their CRC screening, so there's an opportunity here in the U.S., but internationally also, this is very, very under, like, very underpenetrated, Vijay, and one of the things that we bring is established regulatory system distribution. How do we develop the screening and the cancer testing market in these international markets and then if you look at guiding screening guidelines I mean that the age in 20 I think was 2021 was lowered from 50 to 45 that added a lot of new patients what I'm seeing and I think it's more than anecdotal I've seen studies now that we're seeing people like at 30 and 35 be diagnosed with like stage 3 and and so that's not good obviously so you know could I eventually see that being lowered from 45 down to 40 I think I can see that happening because there is a medical need for that and that would add another 20 million people just in the US so so I think the demand is there the piece of the Cologuard which is an incredible value proposition is that with this increasing demand for screening there's only a certain there's a fit on a colonoscopy capacity at least in this country it really hasn't changed It's been six million per year pretty consistently, and if you factor in that there, if you look at gastroenterologists and look at the enrollment rates in medical schools are coming down, so you can see a world where you're going to have increased demand for screening and less supply to be able to do that from a colonoscopy perspective, and Cologuard does really well here. Not only is it convenient at home, but its sensitivity at 95% is equivalent to colonoscopy. So I think the combination of the increased demand followed by this bottleneck, if you look right now, I think in the U.S., I was talking to the team, average wait time for colonoscopy is between three to nine months, depending on the state. So there's already a backlog. So I think the demand and the value proposition of Cologuard is very strong. And if I add a third part there, I think what the team at Exact Sciences has built is pretty unique. So you've got a thousand-person sales force calling on primary care reps, and, you know, it takes time to build that. It's not an easy thing. And you've got 200,000 health care professionals prescribing every quarter ColoGuard, and they have this incredible system where everything is integrated. It's integrated into the healthcare records, it's integrated into, you know, your phone. I mean, it's a very seamless experience, and I think that's pretty unique. I think the other part that is unique to us is that rescreens are becoming a very strong growth contributor. 25% of our tests today are rescreens, and, you know, you're eligible for a rescreen every three years. When you've got all the data, you can obviously interact with your customers to remind them. And what I saw in the data was that you've got a very high re-screen rate, and it gets even higher as the re-screens kind of progress. So I think right now we're seeing about 500,000 patients per year just for re-screen. So I think that that's something that's very unique to this business for us because, you know, they've been doing it for 10 years. So you've got this re-screened business that keeps on growing. And then the third thing, which I think is also very unique to us and what's been built, is these CareGap programs, which I know you know very well also. CRC screening is one of the quality metrics that CMS uses for star ratings. And payers and providers, they get three times this quality score for Cologuard versus a fit test. So we're seeing a lot of interest from healthcare systems and providers to stay ahead and ensure that they're scoring their quality metric points. So I think those three things are pretty unique. And I add that with a combination of the demand, the opportunity international. So I feel very good about our ability to kind of sustain this growth. Now, internationally, is it going to be Cologuard? It could be in some markets. It could be other tests for other markets. But there's clearly a need here. I've traveled to Asia, I traveled to Europe in this first quarter, and I spoke to health ministers, and top three things that we walked away from was they want to get cancer screening up and going in their countries. They see it as a problem, and they see Abbott as one of those solutions. So I feel very good about this business, and the integration's going very well. I couldn't have asked for a better integration. Culturally, I think both companies are very compatible, very focused on the patient. and on innovation and driving growth. So I feel good about it.

Thank you. And our next question will come from Matthew Taylor from Jefferies. Your line is open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking that question. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the trends in Structural Heart and maybe within that just address what's going on in Lefty Trial Appendage Closure. not only do you have programs including the next-gen 360 which I think people are excited about but I was hoping you could comment on what you think the impact could be from the the champion study from your competitor and you have a similar study catalyst that I'll read out here in a year or two but would love kind of an overview of structural heart and LA AC yeah so I think that's That's an interesting question because I think historically what we've done is we've had left atrial

Appendage closure device within our structural heart business And what we decided to do is to move it outside of our structural heart business and put it into our Electrophysiology business and we did that in you know end of last year and beginning starting in January 1st Where we moved the sales force clinical teams? And eventually move manufacturing etc over and we did that just because we felt that this would be beneficial for our electrophysiology business but quite frankly it would be more beneficial for our structural heart business so I'll focus on the structural heart business and the trends there listen I think we've been doing pretty well with this business so when you look at the the I think in our in our queue we've got a reconciliation of the impact of moving those sales out of structural heart into into EP so that's a big contributor to the to the disconnection between the street model and and what we delivered but on top of that you know we have seen some competitive intensity increase here in the in the mitral space as one of our main competitors kind of expanded their portfolio so yeah I think my team can do a better job there they know that also we need to improve our execution in the U.S. We've done some changes to leadership, and I'm expecting our U.S. commercial team here to respond to the challenge. Internationally, growth continues to be very, very strong across the entire portfolio, and we're delivering double-digit growth in Mitral and TriClip and in our structural interventions business. So I think that's going very well, And while there's going to be some geographic differences there, Matt, and I think that geographic difference might persist for a little bit, I continue to expect our structural heart growth here to be a high single digit for the full year. So I feel good about the structural heart portfolio. There are areas that we've got to do better in. I kind of highlighted the product and the geography, and I'm expecting the team to really respond here. So I think the business is doing very well. And then, as I said in my opening comments, we've got a couple trial readouts. As you mentioned, we've completed enrollment in our Catalyst. I don't have a big reaction to my competitor's trial. I'm going to let them, as I'm assuming they probably have done, talk about it. So I'm going to wait until ours comes out, and then I'll comment on ours. But I think it's a it's a high growth attractive business. I think you you mentioned our next generation product I think it is very very exciting product for us. And that's why we thought that moving it over to our EP business would Provide a better acceleration for that product per se and then actually allow our our structural heart team to be more focused on kind of volvular and selling And and keep them more focused so Great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Travis Steed from VOA Securities. Your line is open.

Hey, everybody. I wanted to ask on the nutrition business.

I heard you mention that volume is starting to recover, but if any other call you can give on getting confidence in that business returning to growth in the back half and volume picking up, and then how you're thinking about ongoing portfolio management and value creation and how nutrition fits in that strategic thinking yeah sure like I said in my comments and a couple of the early questions I think we're starting to see we're starting to see that impact we did a pretty comprehensive price assessment not not just at a product level but a geographic level we have I we evaluated our gaps versus our competition so we didn't we didn't reduce prices just basically uniformly across the portfolio Travis we kept it very focused on the products that we believed and based on our experience would demonstrate this positive volume response to a reduced price so when when the price is passed on to the consumer we we're seeing this kind of immediate effect but it takes time for some of that price to get passed on to the consumer right because you've got you got inventory in the channel etc so it doesn't so that price resets the consumer doesn't happen overnight which is why because we know that we wanted to get ahead of it as quickly as possible which is why we did it in Q4 of last year but when you when we've lowered when you see the lower prices get passed through the consumer you're seeing the intended effect so if you look at for example that our US adult nutrition business specifically on ensure that was a product that we knew you know had some had some elasticity and its price and just based on my experience we've seen volume grow across all the retailers that have actually passed that on here in the u.s pass it on to pass that on to the consumer so you're seeing that increase in volume and we kind of use the 2025 that's kind of the baseline obviously not q4 but but but the at least the first half years the baseline so we're tracking this on a monthly basis I know my team looked at this on a weekly basis with the data that's available so I feel good about where we are right now I mean I'm not going to say right now that it's all done and let's just let time pass and then it'll all come through this work we've got to do there are product launches that also allow us to gain distribution there there's work that we need to do in terms of expanding distribution into into the distribution channel so there's a lot of work going on right now but the team is incredibly focused and I think you know this is a this is a team that's been pretty resilient Travis and does pretty well you know at least it's shown to do pretty well when it when encounter some of these challenges they able to bounce back pretty quickly so so right now I'd say on track uh encouraging early signs but still still still work to do uh as it relates to the portfolio um listen i i like the i like the diversity uh of of our business model and the diversity is not just across business segments it's across products it's the diversity in our geography it's diversity in our customer base and different payer types and different innovation cycles you know we don't want to be so heavily weighted on one or two products um that um you that the company is kind of driven there. And I think that diversity really provides us a pretty unique perspective on the global health care system. That being said, Travis, we're constantly looking at our portfolio. We're constantly looking at is the market still attractive? How is our competitive position so that we can determine, do we expand, do we maintain, do we potentially reduce? And we do this on an ongoing basis with management, and we do it with our board. at least once a year sometimes twice a year so so this is uh evaluating our portfolio for value creation is is not like a once every five year exercise we're constantly doing it and i i i think i'd tell you if we see an opportunity um we've demonstrated that we can act upon it so right now my focus here is uh i'm never going to make a long-term strategic decision uh based on kind of near-term challenges. Obviously, nutrition is going through some near-term challenges and going through some transition and recovery phase, and that's what my focus is on, is on getting our business back to a growth rate that we had seen, you know, over the last kind of four or five years. But the idea of constantly evaluating the portfolio, that is something that we do for all businesses in the company, and we do it on a pretty disciplined basis.

Great.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you. And our next question will come from Joanne Wunsch from Citi. Your line is open.

Good morning, and thank you for taking the question. I'm sort of surprised we're 15 minutes into this and no one's asked about macro issues, so I'm going to go there. I'm curious what you're seeing in terms of the potential impacts for the conflict in the Middle East on your business, on oil and resin costs, but also just big picture what you're seeing in terms of patient volumes and reimbursement and, you know, outside of your comments on the respiratory snow days and things like that. Thank you.

The way AVID has been built, it's been built to withstand, you know, withstand these kind of events. And our discipline here is to ensure that we try and get ahead of it. You know, as it relates to oil costs, I mean, I think that's an impact that it's too early to tell. We're not seeing any of that in our costs right now. We're not seeing freight rates increase from our suppliers right now, but we're monitoring it and we have a whole team that monitors and stays close to it. I think one of the things that we do to stay ahead of this, Joanne, is that each one of our business has dedicated teams. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., what they do is they work on gross margin improvement. What are ways that we can do to be able to anticipate cost shocks, to look at ways that we can be more efficient, more effective, look at ways that how we can negotiate with our suppliers. And so I look at the cost element of the conflict. Right now, it's too early to tell, but I'm not saying that I think that there's a big impact is I think that we've got teams in place that are working hard to kind of mitigate. The impact that we saw in Q1 was very minimal, but I wouldn't call it a demand impact. I would call it more of a getting product into the region kind of impact. As you different types of of supply and transport methodology so that's just something that we got to kind of stay stay ahead of you know one of the one of the things the reason we felt a little bit of impact is what we run pretty pretty efficiently with it with our inventory so now we need to make sure that we got a little more inventory at least in our affiliates that we have warehouses in the areas so we so that we have enough product that we don't have so we don't have anything kind of back orders but I didn't see drop-off or demand or reimbursement challenges or issues as a result of as a result of the conflict for us it was more just ensuring that we could get product you know in into the area so and yeah we're highly focused on that and but as you can imagine the teams that Abbott has in this region Joanne I mean they've unfortunately, they have been through a lot and seen a lot. And I give them a lot of credit because, you know, while we focus on kind of growing the business and driving the business, they've got to do that under some very, very tough challenges. So I give a lot of kudos to the work that they've been doing.

Thank you. And our next question will come from Josh Jennings from TD Cowan. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Robert, I'm hoping to get some more details on the EP franchise and the Volt launch internationally and now in the U.S. Internationally, any quantification of how Volt is impacting, you know, share recapture in the ablation catheter segment? For the U.S., just with the early approval of, I guess, Volt 2.0, any updates just in terms of the timing or just how your team is going to move forward into a full launch this year? And then overall, can maybe just help us think about Abbott's updated views on just EP market growth, volumes, pricing, if you would. Thanks so much.

Yeah, sure. Well, it's 55 minutes with the first EP question. So, listen, I think the team has done an incredible job over these past years here of driving double-digit growth. During a window where we didn't have PFA, that window is now closed, so obviously we naturally have expectations and outlooks here that are on the rise. The U.S. launch of Vault and the Internet and the European launch of TaktiFlex Dura are on the way, and both these launches are in what we call like a limited market release phase. We do that with all of our products. It's just part of our process, whether it's in devices, whether it's in diagnostics. What we want to do is before we go to full-blown, we believe there's an intermediate step between what I would believe to be a little bit more of a controlled environment during a clinical trial before going full-blown. And that helps us. It helps us understand resourcing. It helps us understand positioning. It helps us, quite frankly, uncover insights that you might not get during a clinical trial. The feedback we're getting from both these products is extremely favorable and positive and very much aligns to at least our expectation that we did when we were building this portfolio two years ago. I remember a lot of questions of, hey, we were late and we said, okay, we realize we're not first, but we want to take advantage of our mapping systems and develop what we believe was going to be an upgrade to the first generations. I think we're seeing that with Volt. I think the conscious sedation aspect of Volt is extremely valuable, more so now as in the U.S., but even internationally. And that's something that's specific to Volt in terms of how we design that. And I think if you paid attention to the European Heart Rhythm meeting that occurred last week, I think you saw also, albeit preliminary and maybe small, But this idea that the lesions that volt creates are and I think ultimately that Repositions I think or at least balances the discussion on the EP market to be yeah We want more efficiency We want more speed in these procedures because you've got so many patients that you can treat But we want to also figure out how to how to do better outcomes and how to improve patient outcomes and I think that that's what we're believe that VOL can do is to actually deliver on the promise of speed, efficiency, but also an ability to deliver better outcomes. I think the TaktiFlex feedback that we're seeing, Josh, is very positive also, easy to use, very fast lesion creations. This is on the TaktiFlex chassis, so there's a lot of experience with that catheter, pretty seamless switch between RF to PFA. So all very positive. So I think the combination of that great feedback and now us starting to move to broaden the launch is going to give us a lot of confidence here in the growth rate to accelerate. And I think that includes growing faster than the market by the exit of this year. It's your comment. I mean, I know there's a lot of debate about, you know, what is it? Is it 15? Is it 20? We think the market is going to be in the mid to high teens. We're shooting to do better than that. So I think there's an acceleration here. So the near-term outlook, I think, for the business looks really, really strong. But I think more importantly here, Josh, is I like our position long-term also. You've got two new PFA catheters. You've got a new ice catheter. You've got a new introducer. We're constantly making upgrades, annual upgrades to our mapping system. You have the mapping infrastructure in place with the clinical specialists. A highly valuable asset to our customers to have that. And then on top of that, we're now going to be adding a second generation LAA device to this group. No company in this space has got the kind of portfolio that we have and the completeness of the portfolio that we have and the experience and the field teams, et cetera. So, and I know this is not a product that specifically falls into EP as a reportable segment, but we have a lot of EPs that are also using devices, pacemakers, ICDs, and then you add on our leadless technology, which is, you know, very fast growing. I think we have a very, very differentiated EP product portfolio And so I think there are a lot of exciting times in the horizon here for our EP business.

One more question, please.

And our final question will come from Marie Thebold from BTIG. Your line is open.

Good morning. Thanks for squeezing me in. I just want to get a little bit closer to understanding what's going on in the core lab business. I think you've called out strengths in the US, Europe, and Latin America. I think we're moving past some of the China VBP headwinds. Hedwin, so wondering if you can just characterize the CoreLab trajectory by geography during Q1. Any share gains, any notable product launches, things like that to call out? Thanks for taking the questions.

Yeah, sure. I think you kind of characterize it well. I mean, I think our sales in China for CoreLab were flat in Q1. If you think about what they were in last year, we were, you know, between 15% and 30% down. Every quarter so so I think the team here making good progress. We're lapping obviously some of the price and the volume headwinds So that's also a contributor there So I think the market dynamics that we faced You know kind of kind of China I'm cautious to say, you know, like it's all lap because as we know in these BPs you've got different kind of phases. You've got regionals. You got nationals and and all of that, but but I think the impact here is is we know we've got China modeled in at a single digit decline for the year you know could we do better than that seems like the team has done better that in the first quarter and I'm hoping they'll be able to do that I think if I move to the US I think as I said it in the previous question I think the US team has done a fantastic job and the growth rates they're all in the high single digits and they've been there and they've been like that for for some time so we're clearly uh having an ability to to take to renew our contracts at a very high renewal rate so call that 90 plus and uh share gains are now accelerating you know so our win rates uh i would call you know uh 55 plus uh so every business that we're up in new business we're able to you know win one out of two uh so that's a that's a that's a good uh that's a good trajectory over here um you know europe europe it's difficult to characterize as one big europe because as you probably know you got different you got different situations between north and south but in general that that that business has been doing you know mid to high single digits pretty pretty reliably uh so we feel very good about uh very good about the diagnostic business it has been performing well all but you know the impact of vbp in china and That seems to be lapping. So I expect to be getting the full year for our CoreLab business is kind of in that mid-single-digit growth rate. I was talking to the leader of that business yesterday. They've got a plan or some strategies of how they could do better than that. But obviously, the second half is higher than that, and it falls into what we've historically been doing. And like I said, I think the team has done a very good job there at navigating PBP in China and continue to drive growth in any other parts of the business. So I think that's gone very well. Paying attention, for us in China, about 80% of our portfolio has gone through VBP. I think you'll probably hear about new ways of VBP, like a fertility VBP, a cancer VBP. And so we have very little share in those segments. So I think – I don't want to say we're past the eye of the hurricane here, but it seems like the teams have been able to kind of stabilize China and then the other businesses continue to perform the way they've historically been performing. So just before we end the call, I'd like to reiterate my comments that I've made, very remarks. I remain very confident in our expectation here for an acceleration in growth in the second half. Like I said earlier, we know what the drivers are. We know where the accelerations are. We know where areas that we need to improve our execution on, and we are just laser highly focused on executing on them. So with that, I'm going to wrap up, and thank you all for joining us today. Thank you, Operator.

Thank you all for your questions. This now concludes Abbott's conference call, a webcast replay of this call will be available after 11 a.m. Central Time today on our website at Abbott.com. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.