Michael J. Farrell
Thank you, Salli, and good morning from a wintery cold and rainy Sydney, Australia. Good afternoon to those in the U.S., and good evening to those in Europe and beyond and welcome to ResMed's Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. I'm pleased to report that ResMed delivered another very strong quarter, closing out fiscal year 2025 with excellent results. In our fourth quarter, we achieved 10% year-over-year reported revenue growth and 230 basis points of year-over-year gross margin expansion. We continued our disciplined approach to investments in both research and development as well as SG&A, and we delivered another quarter of very strong free cash flow. In addition to the world -- to being the world's leading sleep health and medical devices company, ResMed continues to build a global digital health ecosystem, encompassing sleep health, breathing health and health care delivery in the home. We continue to see robust demand for our products and are now serving more than 154 million lives through our hardware and software platforms as well as our technology solutions. We are well on our way to achieving our ResMed 2030 goal of improving over 500 million people's lives by 2030. I want to take this opportunity to thank the more than 10,000 ResMedians serving patients and customers in more than 140 countries worldwide for all that they do to serve those customers today and every day. Last quarter, I spoke to 3 key themes: first, that ResMed generates robust free cash flow and has a very strong balance sheet. Second, we're committed to operational excellence as well as driving ongoing operating leverage. And third, that ResMed is a compelling investment opportunity. We have a strong sturdy ship that can go through the waves and especially amidst the global macro uncertainty that we're seeing around tariffs and trade and so on ResMed has a very smooth path. These themes remain highly relevant here as we discuss our fourth quarter and our fourth quarter results illustrate them well. So let me walk through the first of those themes. First, our fiscal year 2025 free cash flow was $1.7 billion, which provides ResMed with significant flexibility to both invest in our business and return capital to our shareholders. On the inorganic growth strategy front, we are focused on finding tuck-in size acquisitions that will help us accelerate towards our ResMed 2030 strategy. Recent examples include Somnoware which is software for sleep physicians and pulmonary physicians. Ectosense, which has their product, the NightOwl, which is basically a wearable fingertip size sleep -- home sleep apnea test. And just last quarter, we completed the acquisition of VirtuOx. These businesses will help patients move through the sleep care funnel more efficiently. VirtuOx reduces diagnostic delays, it accelerates the rate of people moving from symptom recognition to home sleep apnea testing, and it keeps more patients on the path to treatment. VirtuOx will continue to operate independently under its own brand, and there are no changes that we plan to help providers and physicians will interact with either VirtuOx or ResMed. In the U.S. health care system, physician prescriptions, payer requirements and the need for personalized setup and support make home medical equipment or HME providers, our essential partners in ensuring patients receive and stay on effective therapy. And sleep labs and home sleep apnea testing run from sleep labs is also a huge part of the infrastructure that we work with all day and every day. You will see us continue to selectively invest in our what we call digital sleep health concierge capabilities, including screening protocols, clinical tools, seamless workflows and cloud connected care pathways. We will be looking to expand the diagnostic funnel to keep up with new patient flow coming from 3 sources. One, and most importantly, our own ResMed driven demand generation efforts that I'll talk about later. Two, the greater awareness of sleep apnea that has been generated by the promotion of GLP-1 or GLP-1 medications, particularly to the specific primary care physician groups that they target and we can target as well with education. And three, the accelerating momentum in consumer wearables that are capable of sleep health monitoring as well as some with specific sleep apnea detection capabilities. ResMed remains laser-focused on helping the more than 2.3 billion people worldwide that suffer from sleep apnea, insomnia or respiratory insufficiency due to COPD or neuromuscular disease and all those that need care delivered in the home. We've also returned significant capital to shareholders in fiscal year 2025 through a combination of dividends and share repurchases that have totaled more than $610 million for the year. I'm pleased to announce that ResMed's Board of Directors, my fellow Board of Directors has authorized an increase in the quarterly dividend for fiscal year 2026. Additionally, we are significantly increasing our targeted share repurchase activity for fiscal year 2026. Brett will discuss both these actions in more detail in his remarks in a few minutes, and they represent the strength of our business. ResMed's very strong free cash flow affords us the ability to invest in the business through R&D and SG&A expenses but also to pursue our share buybacks and raise our dividend, as I just mentioned. But in addition to that, to also have significant funds available for strategic technology and I would call pathway -- seamless pathway type tuck-in acquisitions. My second key message relates to our commitment to operational excellence. ResMed has demonstrated a very strong track record of improving and driving gross margin expansion and a pipeline of opportunities to deliver further operating leverage across our business. In the fourth quarter, we achieved 230 basis points of gross margin expansion year-over-year and well over 100 basis points sequentially quarter-over-quarter. And we have more runway left. We'll continue the execution on these opportunities over the course of our fiscal year 2026 that we're just firing up on here, and I'll update you here on this call every quarter as we continue to deliver these results. We will also continue to evolve our global manufacturing footprint. We're approaching the official opening of our newest manufacturing location in Calabasas, California. This site will double the size of our current manufacturing footprint in the United States and is designed for us to scale up our U.S.-made product volume over the coming years and leverage the amazing technology capabilities of folks in East L.A. in terms of aeronautical and automotive industries that we use in the field of motor technology and motor manufacturing. During the fourth quarter, we delivered very strong net operating profit growth even with the continued investment in both R&D and SG&A. We see these growing investments in innovative R&D as well as SG&A investments that are focused on demand generation, demand capture and demand curation as critical components to ResMed's long-term growth. ResMed is an innovation machine with R&D focused on market-leading masks, cloud connected devices and digital sleep health platforms, along with growing investments in AI, GenAI technology that's across the business. We make the smallest, the quietest, the most comfortable, the most connected and the most intelligent therapy solutions for sleep apnea and now insomnia and respiratory insufficiency as well as having the market-leading software for health care and broader care delivered right where people live. We continue to roll out our amazing AirSense 11 platform to more and more countries in our global markets. Over the course of fiscal year 2026, you'll see us do the same for our latest patient interface technologies, including the AirTouch N30i which has an amazing fabric enhanced capability that can be put on to LSR manufacturing in a very unique way by our manufacturing and technology teams. And also the AirFit F40 which is a minimally contact oronasal nasal mask among many other products in our mask portfolio. We also have a robust road map for incorporating AI and GenAI technology into our digital products. In June, we integrated our digital assistant that we call, Dawn, as in the sunrises into myAir in our Australia business to provide personalized 24/7 support to our local users. We plan to have a wider rollout of Dawn on the myAir platform, which is our app that sits on smartphones throughout fiscal year 2026 as we get regulatory approvals and move that technology to the various countries that we operate worldwide. Watch this space on that front. Additionally, within the myAir app, our smart coaching feature uses machine learning combined with behavioral science-based interventions to enhance personalized PAP therapy outcomes. And finally, our ReSupply attrition predictor helps Brightree customers in the U.S. to better manage patients who are at risk of dropping off or quitting positive airway pressure therapy. This technology enables our HME partners to create personal touch points with patients and to ultimately increase long-term adherence of those patients. Greater long-term adherence leads to better patient outcomes, happier physicians, lower total cost of care for payers and better resupply volumes that are beneficial for HME providers and obviously, for ResMed. As our trained AI technologies improve with more and more data, we foresee ResMed solutions will transform into proactive, personalized health care companions. ResMed is extremely well positioned to turn our over 23 billion nights of respiratory medical data as well as our 3-plus decades of sleep science and sleep medicine knowledge into personalized treatments and personalized insights that integrate seamlessly with wearable data, health data and virtual care. In addition to our products, we see multiple applications for AI and GenAI in our business processes. In our R&D team, the use of agents in verification and validation can reduce development time to a fraction of our prior processes. We're using AI to write test scripts, to diagnose test failures, to write reports, as well as in verification of our product library. We are also rearchitecting development processes. As one example, we've been able to use AI to develop a human head-shaped variance model to represent a broad range of ethnic groups to run virtual fitting studies. This will allow us to replace what was previously our multiple in-person masked fitting studies that would likely be limited in sample size to maybe 100 people and replace it with a digitized model that can simulate many thousands of people using less time, less planning and less investment dollars. This type of doing more with less resources approach is only accelerating as we expand and broaden our use of AI across the business. Our SG&A investments have also continued to show a very strong ROI. Earlier this year, we announced a comprehensive ResMed brand evolution strategy and several targeted direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns to build brand awareness and really importantly, to drive undiagnosed patients to seek care. Results to date have been very promising as we are in the early phases of this. But if this is a marathon, our first mile, I'm here in Australia, our first kilometer was a great lap time. We launched a multi-market campaign targeting sleep health awareness, primarily in countries where we have significant direct market channels, including Germany, Australia, New