Eric M. Green
Before I get into the details of the quarter, I would like to take a moment to reflect on what we accomplished in 2025. We returned to growth and had many notable achievements. Our performance in the year underscores the effectiveness of our growth strategy and our team's relentless focus on execution to deliver for our customers, and we enter 2026 with momentum. Our company surpassed the $3,000,000,000 mark in net sales, achieving year-over-year organic growth of over 4%. We also expanded operating margins, delivered 8% adjusted earnings per share growth, and grew our free cash flow by 70%. Our growth was fueled by increasing demand for high value product components as we continue to meet the evolving market and customer needs. Our growth in that business is driven by three key drivers: the rise of biologics and biosimilars, the increase in global regulatory requirements, such as Annex 1, which continue to drive HPP conversion, and the expanding GLP-1 market. These are long-term secular growth drivers that we believe West is uniquely positioned to capitalize on. We continue to address needs of our customers through scientific support and innovation. A recent example is the launch of the West Synchrony prefillable syringe system. Synchrony marks a significant shift in drug delivery solutions by offering a fully verified platform from a single supplier. Designed specifically for biologics, this system sets a new standard in drug delivery by accelerating syringe selection through its comprehensive performance and regulatory data packages. In early 2025, we announced our intention to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the SmartDose 3.5 mL business. After our portfolio review, we announced last month the sale of the business, which aligns with our ongoing commitment to our customer development pipeline and patient-centric approach for large, on-body delivery devices to drive durable and profitable growth. We expect to close this transaction midyear. For our Contract Manufacturing segment, we continue to scale up operations in Dublin for drug handling, and I am pleased to announce that just earlier this month, we commenced commercial production on this program. This remains an exciting and long-term growth opportunity for the Contract Manufacturing business. Finally, we have strengthened our executive leadership team in 2025, with five out of the 10 members having joined in the last twelve months. This seasoned leadership team is already making meaningful contributions to our organization. With that, I would like to turn to the fourth quarter performance. Revenues of $850,000,000 exceeded our expectations and were up 7.5% reported and up 3.3% on an organic basis. Adjusted operating margins in the quarter were 21.4% and adjusted EPS of $2.04 was up 12% compared to prior year. Free cash flow in the fourth quarter was $175,000,000, more than double the prior-year level. Let us take a closer review of each of the business segments. First, HVP components in our Proprietary Product segment represent 48% of our company's total net sales and continue to be the primary driver of revenue growth and profitability. This business grew over 15% in the fourth quarter and was up 9% for the full year of 2025. HVP components have been tracking on a strong recovery throughout the year to align to the market demand. This business is a key differentiator for us because of our quality, scale, and technology. Once customers are specced into our products and reference our drug master file, there is a dependency there that makes it highly unlikely that customers will change partners. Growth was led by strong GLP-1 performance and continued recovery in our non-GLP-1 business. We continue to see increasing demand in this business and continue to ramp capacity. Bob will talk about our outlook in more detail, but we are expecting 2026 will have a more broad-based growth profile driven by our non-GLP-1 HVP components growing high single digit to low double digits. Moving to HVP delivery devices, which represent 14% of our sales. As expected, fourth quarter revenues declined compared to prior year, driven by the incentive payment we received in the prior-year quarter. However, performance was better than we expected as we saw strong growth in parts of our portfolio. Standard products, which represent 20% of our business, declined 1% on an organic basis during the fourth quarter. Standard products are an important funnel as we convert standard products to HVP components over time, which provides incremental value to our customers and generates incremental revenue and margin expansion for us. Lastly, Contract Manufacturing revenues increased 1.9% organically in Q4. As I mentioned, we commenced commercialization of our drug handling business at our Dublin facility, and we expect this to ramp up throughout 2026. Our drug handling business is more profitable and less capital intensive than the legacy Contract Manufacturing business. Moving into 2026, we have robust momentum as we are well positioned to advance our strategies supported by growth drivers of biologics, Annex 1, and GLP-1s. In biologics, inclusive of biosimilars, we continue to have great success partnering with our customers early in the pipeline, resulting in a strong participation rate of greater than 90%, which is a key indicator for future HVP components revenue growth for this market. For Annex 1, we are well positioned to support our global customers' contamination control strategy and container closure integrity requirements outlined in the European regulations that were adopted in 2023. For West, this is a multiyear opportunity of currently 6,000,000,000 West components to be upgraded that support on-market injectable medicines. I am pleased with the progress to date with over 700 Annex 1 projects initiated, over half of which have been completed and now generating revenues. This represents less than 15% of the 6,000,000,000 components. We completed 65 projects in 2025. With 325 Annex 1-related projects currently underway, and more in the pipeline, we anticipate these projects will drive additional revenue growth in 2026 and beyond. Now let me spend some time on oral GLP-1s and injectable formats. GLP-1s will continue to support our growth in 2026. As many of you are aware, oral GLP-1s have entered the market, and I want to share our view on their potential impact on the overall market. To provide context, I would encourage you to listen to publicly available remarks from the two leading companies that are producing GLP-1s and their expectation that orals will expand, not substitute, injectables in the marketplace. Both companies have noted that eight of ten patients using oral GLP-1s are new to the market, suggesting that orals will not cannibalize the injectables market, and that several new injectables are about to launch. We expect growth from GLP-1 elastomers in 2026 and beyond for the following reasons. First and foremost, the adoption of GLP-1s is still in the early stages with penetration of potential patient population in the low single digits by many estimates. Market access is continuing to expand, driving volume. The available clinical evidence continues to show meaningful advantages for injectables. Historically, oral formulations show higher rates of GI adverse events and treatment discontinuations than injectables. With regard to auto-injectors and multidose pens, we believe that there will be multiple injectable formats based on customer preference. We expect any mix shift will happen over multiple years given the installed capacity and investments that our customers have already made. The upcoming launch of injectable GLP-1 generics in Canada, China, India, and Brazil represents incremental business for us. In addition, there is an exciting clinical pipeline of GLP-1 molecules in development for obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic conditions. Many of these GLP-1s are similar to what is currently on the market today. There are also newer combination molecules which potentially offer increased efficacy, improved tolerability, or therapeutic benefits for adjacent comorbidities. Finally, there are a number of exciting new GLP-1 molecules serving indications other than obesity and diabetes that are projected to come on the market over the next several years. These include NASH, sleep apnea, chronic kidney disease, heart failure, pediatric obesity, and cardiovascular risk reduction. With five of these six indications being treated exclusively by injectables, these indications represent potential multibillion-dollar therapeutic classes. As a result, we continue to believe that both injectables and oral formats will continue to grow. Let me turn to our operations. With our strong reputation for quality, scale, and operational excellence, we are poised to capture growth from these three key drivers as we leverage our global manufacturing network. We are actively hiring and training employees who are installing and operating new equipment to optimize our European facilities and respond to strong customer demand. We utilize tech transfers to help our customers balance production across the network, enabling West to drive future growth. We entered 2026 with momentum and are starting the year with guidance of 5% to 7% organic revenue growth and 10% EPS at the midpoint of the range. I will now turn the call over to Bob to discuss the financials and guidance in more detail. Bob? Thanks, Eric, and good morning, everyone. In my remarks this morning, I will provide some additional details on Q4 revenue, take you through the income statement and some other key financial metrics. I will then cover our full year 2026 and first quarter guidance in more detail. As Eric mentioned, we exceeded our expectations in the fourth quarter, with revenues of $850,000,000. Q4 revenue increased 7.5% on a reported basis and grew 3.3% organically. As we mentioned last call, 2024 included a $25,000,000 nonrecurring incentive fee which reduced our organic growth in the quarter by 360 basis points, so a very good result to end the year. Now a few more details on what drove our growth in the quarter. Our HVP components business was a standout, delivering $390,000,000 in revenue and growing 15.1% organically. This was driven by robust growth in GLP-1s, HVP upgrades including Annex 1, and overall continued improving performance in biologic revenues. The business outside GLP-1s continues to recover nicely, growing mid single digits in the quarter while demand outstripped our supply. As Eric mentioned, we continue to ramp capacity and expect stronger growth in 2026. In HVP delivery devices, revenues were $110,000,000 in the quarter and up $11,000,000 on a sequential basis. The quarter was down 18.1% year-on-year organically, driven by the incentive fee in the prior year. Excluding the incentive fee, revenues would have been up slightly in the quarter. In standard products, revenues of $162,000,000 were down 1.7% on an organic basis, partially driven by Annex 1-related conversion to HVP components. Lastly, our Contract Manufacturing segment delivered $143,000,000 in revenue, growing 1.9% on an organic basis. Segment performance in the quarter was driven by an increase in sales of self-injection devices for obesity and diabetes, partially offset by a decrease in sales of health care diagnostic devices. In the quarter, our Contract Manufacturing segment revenue and profit performance was negatively impacted by a temporary production disruption due to a burst water main at our Arizona facility. The facility is back up and running, and we expect Contract Manufacturing to return to mid to high teens profitability in Q1. Now let us take a closer look at the rest of the P&L. Overall gross margin was 37.8% in the quarter, up 130 basis points year over year. This strong result was due to the positive mix impact of HVP components growth and better-than-expected performance on our HVP delivery device business outside of SmartDose. This proof point demonstrates the earnings power of our business strategy as we continue to upgrade customers to our high value products. Adjusted operating margins of 21.4% were down 30 basis points compared to the prior year as we increased investment in R&D, and had higher incentive compensation year on year. Below the line, net interest income was in line with our expectations, our tax rate came in at 18.9% for the quarter, slightly better than expected, and we had 72,700,000 diluted shares outstanding in the quarter. Adding it all up, Q4 adjusted earnings per share were $2.04, up 12.1% versus last year and $0.20 above the midpoint of our guidance we gave on the last earnings call. Before moving into 2026 guidance, I did want to highlight our cash flow performance. In the quarter, we delivered operating cash flow of $251,000,000 and our full-year operating cash flow was $755,000,000, up 15.5% compared to the prior year. This is a very strong result and a testament to the West team. We are also continuing to drive increased efficiency in our capital spending. Capital expenditures for the year of $286,000,000 are down $91,000,000 year on year, and we expect another step down in 2026 to a range of $250,000,000 to $275,000,000 as we move back to the construct of spending 6% to 8% of sales in CapEx. The combination of strong operating cash flow and the lower CapEx drove free cash flow to $469,000,000 for the year, up 70% year on year. We ended the year with $791,000,000 in cash on our balance sheet. In summary, we had a very solid fourth quarter that exceeded our expectations and we are entering 2026 with momentum. Now let me talk about our initial guidance for 2026. Before getting into the numbers, I want to highlight a few important factors that help frame our thinking in setting our guidance.