Cardinal Health at Baird Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

Published 10/09/2025, 15:06
Cardinal Health at Baird Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Cardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) presented a strategic overview at the Baird Global Healthcare Conference 2025. The discussion highlighted robust revenue and operating income growth, alongside strategic acquisitions. While the company showcased strong relationships and revenue gains, it also acknowledged challenges like competitive bidding in its At-Home Solutions sector.

Key Takeaways

  • Cardinal Health reported a strong finish to the year with a 22% revenue growth excluding Optum and an 11% increase in reported operating income.
  • The acquisition of Solaris Health, a urology-focused MSO, is expected to be accretive and align with existing partnerships.
  • The company projects over $10 billion in cash flow over the next three years, with $2.75 billion to $3.25 billion expected in the coming year.
  • Cardinal Health’s diversified businesses, including Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions and OptiFreight Logistics, are contributing significantly to growth and profitability.
  • The company is confident in managing competitive bidding challenges in the At-Home Solutions sector.

Financial Results

  • Revenue Growth:

- Overall revenue showed strong growth, led by Pharma Specialty Solutions.

- Excluding Optum, revenue increased by 22%, demonstrating broad-based strength.

- Specialty growth reached a mid-teens percentage rate, excluding Optum.

  • Operating Income Growth:

- Reported operating income rose by 11%.

- Estimated adjusted operating income growth was 18%, excluding one-time expenses.

  • Profit Guidance:

- The profit guide for the Pharma business increased to 11% to 13% for fiscal year 2026.

  • Cash Flow:

- Projected cash flow exceeds $10 billion over the next three years.

- Expected cash flow for the coming year ranges from $2.75 billion to $3.25 billion.

  • M&A Activity:

- The Solaris Health deal is anticipated to be slightly accretive within the first 12 months post-closing, expected by year-end.

Operational Updates

  • Optum Transition: Successfully managed the transition of the second-largest customer, Optum.
  • CVS Growth: Significant growth with CVS, driven by strong relationships and GLP-1 benefits.
  • Solaris Health Acquisition:

- Focused on urology with over 750 providers.

- Expected to close by the end of the calendar year.

- Complements existing MSO partnerships, such as GI Alliance.

  • At-Home Solutions:

- Leader in medical home supplies distribution.

- Investing in distribution with new centers; three new DCs in the last three years, with more planned.

- Competitive bidding exposure is approximately 15% of the total At-Home Solutions business.

  • Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions:

- Leader in nuclear radiopharmaceutical isotope manufacturing and pharmacy distribution.

- Focused on precision health, particularly in oncology, urology, and neurology.

  • OptiFreight Logistics:

- Provides freight management for large health systems, expanding into the pharmacy sector.

Future Outlook

  • Continued growth expected in Pharma Specialty Solutions.
  • Synergies and value creation anticipated from the Solaris Health acquisition.
  • Ongoing expansion and investment in diversified businesses, including Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions and OptiFreight Logistics.
  • Focus on growing Cardinal Health branded products and simplifying costs in GMPD.
  • Confident in managing competitive bidding in At-Home Solutions.

Q&A Highlights

  • Organic Growth: Emphasis on new business wins, totaling $10 billion in incremental growth, and strength in generics and specialty areas.
  • Large Customer Growth: Growth with CVS attributed to strong relationships and benefits from GLP-1 products.
  • MSO Strategy: Solaris Health acquisition aligns with the strategy, leveraging synergies with existing partnerships like GI Alliance.
  • GMPD Transformation: Focus on brand growth, cost simplification, and tariff mitigation.
  • Competitive Bidding: Exposure limited to 15% of the At-Home Solutions business, with confidence in maintaining market position.
  • Capital Allocation: Focused on shareholder value creation through disciplined capital allocation.

In conclusion, Cardinal Health’s presentation at the Baird Global Healthcare Conference 2025 painted a picture of strategic growth and operational resilience. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Baird Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Good to go. Great. Good morning, everyone. My name is Eric Caldwell. I cover pharma services, healthcare distribution, and related industries for Baird. It’s a great pleasure to have Cardinal Health with us here today. On stage with me, Jason Hollar, CEO, Aaron Alt, CFO, and of course, Matt Sims, who leads up Investor Relations. We’re very excited to have Cardinal. This has been a lot of fun the last few years since you joined.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Some fun.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Officially, I had a few best picks for the year, but officially, Cardinal Health was my top idea for 2025.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: We enjoyed making you look good.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Thank you for making me look good. I needed some help. I needed some help for sure. I’m going to let Matt take a couple of minutes and do disclosures, and then we’ll just jump right in.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Perfect. Thank you for hosting us, Eric. It’s great to be here as always. Before we begin, just a few reminders. 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 IR website at ir.cardinalhealth.com. Back to you.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Great. I just finished the year on a really strong note. The Street didn’t read it the same way I did. I think maybe there was a little jubilation coming out of Investor Day, and then, you know, kind of sell the news for a hot second, but it was a great finish. I want to dig in on a couple of topics quickly at a high level. Revenue growth, fantastic ex-Optum, of course, that annualizes this quarter. You had some M&A, you had some GLP-1 growth, you had some net new wins, a lot of moving pieces. Aaron, maybe this is for you. I’m just hopeful you can walk us through some of those building blocks to get back to your organic growth rate, which, Jason, whoever wants it, takes it. Talk about organic growth. Like, same store. What’s the real underlying metric on top line?

How do you think that stacks up to the market?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Yeah, no, thanks for having us, Eric. I’d like to jump in on that one because it is an important part of our story as an enterprise. You think about the Pharma Specialty Solutions segment as by far the largest, most significant part of our business. Let me just kind of address your lead-in that you highlighted there. I think it’s important to understand, just Q4 and the year-end is that we did have our Investor Day in June, just a few weeks before the end of the fiscal year. Of course, we just finished up our reporting and all that just a few weeks ago. Not a lot of new information we provided today, given all those opportunities. The stock’s been very strong over that period of time. We’ve been very pleased with the underlying operating results that have driven that.

A very clear strategic message I think investors really appreciated in the transparency we provided at Investor Day. As it relates to your question around the growth of this large, important segment, yeah, it was very strong. It’s 22% ex-Optum. That shows the broad-based strength that we’ve seen throughout our business. The underlying utilization was strong across the enterprise. There’s an industry aspect to it, but there’s also a specific aspect where we had $10 billion of incremental new business that came online more in the second half of the fiscal year, which now carries over to about $7 billion for the first half of fiscal 2026 until you get to that anniversary point. That’s being driven across the business. It’s also being driven with, you know, it doesn’t impact revenue a whole lot, but certainly generics is an important profit contributor for us and one that was also strong.

Specialty, which is important from both a top line and a bottom line perspective. We saw yet another year of that mid-teens type of % growth rate when you ex out for Optum. That just demonstrates that we’re investing in the right areas, growing in the right areas, winning with the winners, but also making the appropriate investments. We’re really pleased with that broad-based strength. It’s driven organically, but also through the investments and also through some of those new customers.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: If I remember, specialty has been growing at about a 14% plus CAGR for the last four years, five years?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Now about a $40 billion business. This last year is a little touch higher than that as well. That is why when people ask us about IRA redesign and other aspects, is it driving some of this revenue? Maybe a little bit, but because of the breadth into areas that are less impactful from that planned participant’s behavior, because the price points are lower, like on generics, or the fact that specialty has been consistently high, we don’t see the growth rates changing a lot as these policies change.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: If we shift from revenue to operating income growth, I think reported was around 11%. You did have the last quarter to comp the Optum transition. Aaron, you highlighted some maybe unexpected heightened expenses, a little bad debt, or some vendor changes. You can talk about that if you want to go into details. You highlighted a few things that popped up at the end of the quarter that I’m not sure if it was truly an anomaly, but certainly an elevated period compared to what you were expecting. You backed those two out. I come up with at least 18% operating income growth. I don’t know if your math is in the same zip code as mine. Maybe you don’t want to respond to that.

I am hoping you could parse what happened at the end of the quarter that was perhaps a little bit of a surprise versus your thinking at Investor Day and then how that plays into fiscal 2026.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Sure, happy to do it. I want to start with repeating something Jason said, which is we saw strong demand in the quarter and indeed across the year. I know it’s not lost on any of you that in a year in which we had a transition of our second largest customer, our largest business for the quarter still delivered 11% profit growth and for the year delivered 12% profit growth. You correctly called out that we were at the bottom end of the range that we had called at Investor Day three or four weeks earlier. Frankly, what that was at year-end, we’re a big company and usually these things net off each other. We were called about $10 million off of what we thought we’d be.

It was a series of individually immaterial items that added up like bads and bad debt adjustments, a couple of other contract settlements. We go back to the strength of the portfolio from a demand perspective and the progress that Deborah Weitzman and team had made around operating that pharma business really gives us a lot of confidence. That’s why, in part reflecting on that, is why we actually raised our profit guide from what we had said earlier at Investor Day as well and took pharma up to 11% to 13% for fiscal year 2026, in no small part based on the non-repetition of those items as well as the continued strong demand environment.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: All right, last one of the boring growth questions.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Nothing’s boring about growth, though, right?

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: All right, I’ll see if I finally ask something that no one else asks at all the other conferences. You have another large customer. In the last several years, your organic growth with that customer has been mid to high single digits, 7.5% CAGR, I believe. This year it was 23%. Your other competitor who shares that account went from a 16% plus growth CAGR to slightly negative in the same year. What’s going on here?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: You’re talking about CVS. Let’s go ahead and just make sure we’re clear about that. I’m not going to talk about the other side of it. We have a great relationship with CVS. Of course, we have a number of partnerships, whether it’s Red Oak Sourcing on generics or Aviron on biosimilars. Our growth has been pretty consistently quite strong with them. I’m not going to speak to why it would not be as strong in other places. With our portfolio and where we focus on our support of that customer, it’s largely within the retail side of their business. They’ve benefited like all of our customers have. I’m not giving any details on CVS, but all of our customers have benefited from GLPs. All of our customers have benefited from store closures of non-Cardinal Health customers.

When you think about some of the reductions that happened with some of the large chains, our customers have not had quite the, I mean, CVS had some closures a couple of years ago, but in the more recent past, they’ve had a lot fewer of those. We and CVS have benefited from that broad utilization strength, but there’s nothing to call out in terms of a dramatic shift in the scope of our relationship with them other than just the ongoing growth of these partnerships.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: I didn’t know if it had possibly anything to do with what they’re doing in biosimilars, was Cordavis or just your overall Red Oak relationship?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: In terms of the scope of biosimilars and how that’s supported, that’s not any different other than, again, we have Aviron on the sourcing side. Speaking broadly, not about CVS Health, but about the industry, there are revenue reductions as branded products go to LOE with biosimilars. There are instances where price per unit does reduce, just like with generics, and branded products go to generic. That is an element that would impact us less in that relationship than our competitor.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Yeah, fair enough. Let’s talk about your MSO strategy. You have recently announced another deal with Solaris Health. That is a leading urology managed service organization. I’d like you to, in one or two lines, say what it is, what it does, why you love it, and it’s not in guidance yet. Remind us when you think it’s going to close. I’ll jump into a couple of maybe impact questions after that.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: We anticipate it closing by the end of the calendar year. It is a urology-focused MSO managed service organization that covers over 750 providers throughout the United States. They are the leader within the urology space. It is a very fragmented therapeutic area, still talking less than 5% share of the overall market, largest but a very fragmented market. That is very attractive to us to be able to get in relatively early in the consolidation within this therapeutic space. Why we? The services they provide are similar to other large-scale MSOs in terms of not only the back office, but more of the more complex type of support for those physicians. What we like about it is it fits very neatly, tightly within our stated strategy. We are not accommodating and adapting the strategy for what businesses and partnerships are available.

We are starting with our strategy and then prioritizing those areas, those partners that best accommodate that. Urology is a space that we love for a lot of different reasons. To start with, there are a lot of similarities between the needs of those physicians and autoimmune, where we are the leader with GI Alliance and the Specialty Alliance already. There is a nice fit across the different therapeutic areas between autoimmune, even some of the ancillary services. You think about pathology, anesthesia, diagnostic imaging, all these types of things. In addition to all the back office, HR, IT, finance, support, revenue cycle management, you can get into specialized similarities that we are going to take Solaris Health and combine with Urology America and the other additions we have had in urology.

That will create some synergies, but there will be some synergies more broadly with the rest of the Specialty Alliance. The additional reason that we really like urology beyond all that, and I would call that kind of the first order synergies and what we would include in a business case when we evaluate it, there is a lot of option value as it relates to urology because we do lead in many key areas of the space. Think about our expertise in nuclear and the radiopharmaceutical products with our Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions business. We lead in oncology and in urology. Our At-Home Solutions business is the leader of medical supplies being delivered to patients’ homes.

Of course, Specialty Networks actually originated in urology and is by far the leader in that space. An interesting anecdote about Solaris Health is while we do not support them today from a distribution and GPO perspective, we have a long relationship with them with Specialty Networks and TPS Analytics. It is a key partner customer with that business, and it helps bring all this together. It is a space that continues to be important for us, and we love urology, but we absolutely love the partnership we are going to have with Solaris Health.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: It seems like you’re getting some solid accretion from other deals done in the space once they’ve onboarded. This deal hasn’t closed. It’s not in guidance. You did say that once it closed, it would be slightly accretive in the first 12 months. Is there a different dynamic to the onboarding, the ramp, the multiple paid? Is there something unique about this that would prevent it from becoming as accretive or driving the kind of upside you’ve seen from some of the other deals?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: It’s a great question. We have high hopes for what Solaris will bring to the Specialty Alliance overall. I would point out it’s our practice, and this was true for GI Alliance when we announced that transaction as well. We don’t provide specific guidance other than to signal the relative accretion upon close. There are a couple of further thoughts. First, we do not assume that we will take on the distribution when we’re doing the deal. As Jason referenced, we are not the current distributor for Solaris. You will have noticed in our last earnings call in Q4, a couple of weeks ago, we did acknowledge that we were picking up the distribution and provided the timing of the distribution on GI Alliance and the oncology part of our ION business. We will, of course, put our best foot forward to seek the urology distributions while carrying forward.

That’s not in the accretion math. Similarly, because Solaris is the second large platform acquisition we’ve done in the specialty area, consistent with the strategy we called out two years ago at Investor Day when we talked about really focusing where our strength is and the other ologies and driving the diverse revenue streams there, we are being careful to not be too declarative on how we are going to put Solaris and GI Alliance and how will the cross synergies across those platforms come together. We want to be very careful about how we do that. We’ll provide more context on that as we close the deal and then lay out our plans as we carry forward.

We did want the investment community to understand that we were doing a very strategic deal for us in the urology space, consistent with everything we had said, that the deal would be accretive in the first 12 months. We’re going to, of course, go looking for additional opportunities to drive value creation as we have across each of the pieces of M&A we’ve now done the last two and a half years.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Aaron, in terms of your philosophy on guidance around special events like this, maybe you’re building a bit of a reputation for being very conservative and modest with your view. I know you haven’t included distribution a couple of times now. Are there other things you haven’t included? You mentioned a few, right? You’re just taking it easy with the integration path. Are there other things that you just philosophically don’t include when you have a novel event like this and you hold off until it happens?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: To the philosophy point, we are very careful to tell you what we’re going to do, go do it, and report back. Of course, while we’re doing that, always looking for how can we do more with the assets that we have and the assets that we acquire. When you’re going through any M&A process, of course, you’re digging deep into that asset itself. Our team is working incredibly hard right now to both understand how this will, what Solaris will look like in partnership with GI Alliance, but also to the point Jason was making earlier, to really unlock those additional opportunities. With us acquiring Solaris and partnering that on top of Urology America, on top of Potomac Urology, on top of Prime and the other acquisitions we’ve done, right, we really are the leader in urology.

Part of what we’re working on now from an integration planning perspective, and Deborah Weitzman is personally responsible for making sure that we deliver this at Jason’s direction, is how will we do more with the broader assets. That will become more clear as we bring the specifics once we close the deal, which is, I think Jason referenced, we’re hopeful for it by calendar year-end close.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Fantastic. Part of me doesn’t even want to ask about global medical products and distribution because it’s only a low to mid-single-digit % of your adjusted operating income. If I don’t ask, I’m going to get in trouble. I have to do a few questions. I’ll make it easy and quick. Cardinal Health branded products, part of your strategy is to increase the penetration of brands. You’ve rolled out a number of new proprietary products that you’ve, I think, you know, proudly presented at Investor Day, and you’ve had some good traction with those. You had 6% growth last quarter in brands. Where do you see this going? Give us an update on where mix is of brands versus services and tell us, you know, what’s going to continue that momentum or will it continue?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Yeah, we’ve been pleased with the lack of surprises in this business other than tariffs, of course, which is something well out of our control, one that the team has managed very adeptly to mitigate the vast majority of those impacts. The underlying volume growth of Cardinal Health branded products has been quite strong, 5%, 6% each of the last couple of quarters. It highlights the work that the team has done to really focus on the core operations. Our service level, think about it, all these supply chain challenges, including tariffs, very, very recently where we’re having to resource and move product to different product flows, our service levels have never been higher in this product line with this business.

The team has done a great job of delivering high-quality products on time to our customers in a time of a lot of uncertainty and change in the supply chain. That is what’s necessary to be able to grow your own products. That is table stakes. That’s what we’re focused on. Our long-term plans are anticipating continued market growth in the lower single-digit, 2% to 3% range. What we need is slightly faster growth than that, a point or so. What that combined with our simplification work allows us to reduce our costs, be more efficient. The combination of those two items gives us the confidence that we can grow that business about $50 million per year in profitability over the life of the next three years. It’s still got a long runway of opportunity in front of it.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: In this space, you have one large private competitor that’s very broad. You have a couple of public competitors that have maybe a bit more of a niche. Both of those competitors are for sale or seeking a strategic alternative. Let’s leave it broadly at that. What does that tell us about the space? Do you get any benefits from disruption as two of the larger, the biggest non-acute player, the third biggest acute player are both going through these?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: I do believe we’re the most predictable, stable business in this industry right now. That is not bad when you’re talking about working with potentially new customers. We’re focused on our current customers. It’s a lot that we can still do to help them. What you’re describing, again, not speaking for others, is that the competitive dynamics in the space, I don’t believe, are any different. I think what is different over the last several years is it’s just been a challenging part of the industry because of the supply chain. This is a deeper, more global, more complex supply chain than the rest of our businesses. With the supply chain shocks comes additional actions and variability that you just haven’t seen in other parts of our business.

That is unique, and that has created an environment where we all have to work harder for the same level of output that comes at it. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s more activity in this space. Our focus continues to be when we completed the formal part of our portfolio review about a year ago. I say formal because this is healthy for every organization to always look at their portfolio. When we completed that, and the last piece to complete was the GMPD part of our enterprise. What we said there is that what we’re prioritizing is the transformation of this business. We were just coming out of losses, pretty significant losses in this business. We didn’t have a lot of optionality with it.

The reality is there’s a lot of opportunity for us and for our customers to still drive the improvements that we laid out within the GMPD improvement plan. That’s what we’re focused on.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Yeah, and importantly to that point, we’re very pleased with the progress that the team has made in driving the plan with the Cardinal Health brand growth, with the continued cost simplification, with the mitigation of tariffs, with everything going on to see the dramatic improvement of profit in GMPD as well as the improvement in their cash flow. It speaks well of our efforts to put one foot in front of the other and continue our overall value creation efforts through that transformation plan. On an exciting note, I think Matt and Dustin and the team did a great job with Investor Day. You really probably more than ever started to shift the conversation to some of your diversified businesses. People have been so focused on generics and biosimilars and MSOs and tariffs and what’s going on in GMPD.

I think they’ve lost sight or maybe never had sight of nuclear and at-home OptiFreight. These are some really cool businesses. High growth, 3% of revenue, 20% of adjusted operating income, high margin, great outlook. I’d like to help you help others continue to understand these diversified businesses. Maybe if you want to take a second and give a one-liner on each one, how it stacks up in the marketplace, just to help frame that. We’ll dive into a couple of questions.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Yeah, thanks for the question and opportunity to talk about these fantastic businesses. These are our other growth businesses, Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions, At-Home Solutions, and OptiFreight Logistics. I think the IR team did a great job telling the story as to why they are impactful and important. You should step back. It’s been about a year and a half now since we broke them out of their larger segment parents, if you will. That was a starting point to give us the opportunity. Now, let’s be clear, we did not break them apart so that you would have better visibility. It wasn’t some type of financial engineering here.

We did it to give them the light of day, the very clear leaders, these three operating segment presidents that do directly report to me, get them more access to the senior leadership and the resources of the enterprise, organic and inorganic, that they would have had more difficulty being able to achieve that type of flexibility, that type of speed, that type of access to capital if you’re buried deeper in the organization. That was as a result of that, the formal business and portfolio review. It wasn’t all about looking at should something be sold. It was also about where do we need to lean in and invest in. That’s what we did with these three businesses. Each of these three businesses are in the faster growing parts of the industry, secular trends that are advantaging these businesses. That’s more broad from the industry.

Each of the three are the leaders in their respective part of the industry. That is the profile of the businesses that you want to support more and then provide more investments. As a result of that portfolio review, we gave more investments to each of the three because of their leadership and in the right secular trends. What do they do? At-Home Solutions, this is the business that is the only scaled provider and distributor of medical home supplies directly into the patient’s home, roughly balanced type of revenue on both sides. A broad array of different product lines. This business is differentiated because we are by far the best at what we do on the distribution side from the legacy Cardinal Health At-Home Solutions business. With ADSG and that acquisition, they are the leader in patient acquisition and customer service.

We’re taking the best of the best approach there. It’s a fantastic combination because of the strengths of both sides. Within our Nuclear & Precision Health Solutions business, leader in nuclear radiopharmaceutical isotope manufacturing, as well as pharmacy distribution. We have the country’s largest distribution network there, but we also manufacture in a number of locations as well. We are benefiting from the trend on precision health and taking these isotopes, working with big pharma to provide very targeted precision products to primarily in the areas of oncology and urology, but more and more expanding into other therapeutic areas. For a long time, cardiology in terms of the core legacy products, but in terms of theranostics and the higher energy new products, that’s very much focused on oncology, urology, and neurology.

OptiFreight Logistics, the long history of freight management for large health systems, effectively goes into a health system, working with their logistics team, and finding more efficient and lower cost ways to work with freight providers. We do this primarily historically in the med-surg space, but more recently expanding into the pharmacy side.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Let’s not forget, importantly, much higher margin businesses growing 25% to 27% in fiscal 2026, 26% in the top line, growing even higher than that. That’s while you’re making some investments. We recently saw the press release on the distribution centers in at-home, for example.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: That’s right. We had three new DCs in the last three years. We just announced the fourth, and we’re going to do three additional investments over the next three years. The number four has already been announced. We have south, southeast, west, and midwest now all defined, and three of them are already up and running. It really helps increase capacity, but also efficiency.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Perhaps less so with OptiFreight, you could correct me, but the other two tie in pretty nicely to your MSO strategy.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: They tie in very nicely to the MSO strategy. OptiFreight® Logistics is a fantastic business that ties into our medical business, our GMPD business, and our pharma business, but less so into the MSOs. Having freight expertise does not hurt any business.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: One thing the street worries about is competitive bidding, and that relates to at-home specifically and really to EdgePark and ADSG, not the distribution side. About half of at-home. You’re a huge player in diabetes. I’ll have another question in a minute because we had a diabetes panel yesterday and a number of diabetes manufacturers reporting presenting here. Talk to us about your exposure to competitive bidding, and I think more importantly, talk about what happens when you win, because you should win. You’re the biggest player by far. Talk about what happens with scale advantage, market share in the competitive bidding areas. Any other thoughts on how this process may unfold and your overall exposure?

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Sure. The nature of your question, it’s a little early because it’s the very beginning of the process.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: We haven’t even seen everything.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: There’s been a lot of comments back about the administration’s approach to that. To your point, we are the, again, we’re the only large-scale provider and distributor. Even if we lose, we may win because we distribute to so many of the other HME, DMEs. It is a very wide array of opportunity we have. There’s certainly a significant volume opportunity. As it relates to the exposure to our business, it’s only about 15% of the At-Home Solutions total book of business’s CGM fee-for-service. We are quite diversified. That was what we really liked about the ADSG acquisition. We knew about this possibility when we were doing that transaction. What this did is it gives us an even more diverse payer setup, even more diverse product exposure. At 15%, we think it’s quite manageable for the business.

As the leader in this space, we feel very confident that when you think about, well, who will succeed through this process, it will be the most efficient, most capable providers. That is us. We are clearly the most efficient, the most capable, and we are investing more than anyone else is in terms of that distribution capability. We’ll be able to do things, we already do things that others can’t do, and we’re extending that lead through these investments, both organic and inorganic. We feel really good about our positioning here. I do think there’s going to be some volume opportunities, and we’ll see how it all shakes out. I also think what’s important is when you think about the intent of what the administration is looking to accomplish here, it really is focused on fraud.

There’s a lot of data points that highlight that this space is just wrought with a lot of that fraud. Of course, we are one of the good actors in this space. We invest heavily in our compliance programs and feel really good about where we stand. I absolutely believe there will be fewer providers out there. That’s no doubt in my mind. I’d say it’s safe to say if we’re not the last one standing, we will be one of the last ones standing because of the capabilities that we bring to this space. We feel really good about that position.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Unfortunately, I’m seeing the clock tick down to zero seconds. Aaron, I’m not going to get to ask you about your amazing cash flow and how you’re going to deploy it. If you wanted to give us a 20-second summary, we can let you run with that.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: $10 billion plus in the next three years, coming off a strong year of cash flow. We are expecting $2.75 billion to $3.25 billion in this coming year. We are remaining constant to our disciplined capital allocation strategy to really create shareholder value over the long term.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: That’s a great finish.

Jason Hollar, CEO, Cardinal Health: Twenty seconds, there you go.

Eric Caldwell, Analyst, Baird: Everyone, please join me in thanking Cardinal Health. That was great. Thank you, guys.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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