Sonic Healthcare Ltd (SKHCF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sonic Healthcare Financial half-year ended 31st December 2023 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dr. Colin Goldschmidt. Thank you very much, Joss, and good morning and good day to everyone on this call. I'm Colin Goldschmidt, CEO of Sonic Healthcare, and I'm joined today by my colleagues Chris Wilkes, Paul Alexander, and Diane Ayres. It's a pleasure for me to present the half-year results of SONIC to December 31, 2023. If you can go please to slide three where we'll start, which is showing our headline numbers. First of all, our revenue number at $4.3 billion is 5% above the corresponding period last year. But of course, that now is not truly comparable to last year because of COVID revenue, which was present in the previous period. But if you exclude COVID and take our base business revenue, the growth is 15%. And I just want to call out at this point that the comparatives against the previous period are not entirely pertinent because of the difference in COVID revenue between the two periods. Our EBITDA number at $737 million for the half is in line with the guidance we provided at the AGM last year. And we are on track to achieve our full year EBITDA guidance. And we are pointing to it ending more likely towards the lower end of our guidance range. If you look at base business organic revenue gro...