Henry Schein at Bank of America Conference: Strategic Moves and Market Insights

On Wednesday, 24 September 2025, Henry Schein Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC) presented at the Bank of America Global Healthcare Conference 2025, offering a comprehensive overview of its strategic initiatives and market position. The company discussed both opportunities and challenges, highlighting stable patient traffic and international growth amid fluctuating interest rates and tariff impacts.

Key Takeaways

• Henry Schein aims for $100 million in annual savings through value creation projects.
• International business growth is driven by stabilized energy prices in Europe.
• The company is expanding its sales force to enhance customer retention and market share.
• A $750 million share repurchase program reflects confidence in the company’s valuation.
• The dental, medical, and technology segments are central to Henry Schein’s growth strategy.

Financial Results

• Henry Schein is focused on cost optimization, aiming for significant savings by year-end.
• The company plans to consolidate back-office functions and explore offshoring.
• A restructuring plan is expected to save $75 million to $100 million, with additional savings from new initiatives.

Operational Updates

• Patient traffic in the dental segment remains stable, with interest rate cuts potentially boosting equipment sales.
• Promotional activities are designed to increase customer commitment and market share.
• The addition of experienced sales reps is expected to enhance customer education and profitability.

Future Outlook

• Henry Schein targets high single-digit EPS growth for 2026, building on 2025 as a base year.
• The company is adapting to macroeconomic factors such as interest rates and unemployment.
• Strategic initiatives in dental, medical, and technology segments aim to drive growth and profitability.

Q&A Highlights

• The impact of Medicare Advantage plan changes on dental implants is expected to be minor.
• Growth in dental implant procedures is driven by Dental Service Organizations (DSOs) and value implants.
• The company is leveraging its broad product portfolio to mitigate tariff impacts and maintain competitiveness.

For a deeper dive into Henry Schein’s strategic initiatives and market insights, refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - Bank of America Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Host: We have CFO, Ron South and Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Graham Stanley. Thank you both for you, Ron. Joining Really appreciate it. Ron, would love to get your latest thoughts on the macro environment across your different regions. The U.

S. Is cutting interest rates, feels like things are maybe evolving a little bit, but how has the macro environment evolved at all since the beginning of calendar twenty twenty five? Certainly.

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: So I think that I’ll kind of address

Unidentified speaker, Host: first within the macro environment in dental,

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: what we’re seeing is and people can see the same patient traffic data that’s out there that we see. I mean, traffic has remained relatively stable. I think over the course of the year, Patient traffic is often the best barometer for what you’re going see in terms of merchandise sales and what kind of churn do you get in merchandise. You mentioned the lowering of interest rates in The U. S.

We view that as an important macroeconomic factor in two regards. One is kind of in the more short term micro perspective, it does provide perhaps opportunity for a little more lift in equipment sales. Some of the larger dollar equipment sales are typically financed either through leasing or through some form of financing. So you could see a little bit of a lift in equipment revenues, if in fact interest rates continue to come down. I think in the longer term kind of macro effect of lowering interest rates could also result in an acceleration of the build out of some new practices, new dental practices.

Frequently, it’s the DSOs that kind of lead the way with with that new construction. And the DSOs themselves are often owned by private equity. And as those interest rates come down, the hurdle rate in terms of that rate of return, that required rate of return of that investment for them becomes a little easier to achieve and you could see an increase in those de novo practices being built. That helps us obviously with the build out of those practices and the equipment sales that would be associated with it. But even after that, the DSOs are confident that they can fill those practices with new patients and that churn of new patients going through actually kind of expands the market, gives us greater opportunity in merchandise sales.

I think that’s an expansion of market that has been missing, a meaningful expansion of the market that has been missing over the last couple of years.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: I’d also add from that, I mean internationally, say that we’re seeing maybe some pick up a little bit internationally, particularly in Mainland Europe. If you remember eighteen to twenty four months ago, there was sort of a whole energy price increases that were impacting the overall economies. That’s now idealized out. I think international business is on a slight tick up in trajectory.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Then, Ron, around your comments around DSOs, If we look at DFAs, economists, we’re expecting at least one more rate cut in December. As I think about or I try to qualify the comments you just made, are you seeing more de novo builds, more DSOs looking to build things out versus maybe three months ago or six months ago? And is that informing your commentary around the outlook for digital equipment or your thoughts around digital equipment? Or are

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: you just

Unidentified speaker, Host: saying, illustratively, if interest rates go down, that could be a driver of those things?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: I think at this point, it’s a little more in terms of what we are forecasting. But I will say we do track what we call we have a service that helps our customers design redesign their practices in a typically in a sense they can add a chair or do something and make a meaningful change to the layout of their practice. That particular service that we are providing has seen double digit growth year over year in every month of through July, every month that we had that we were retract this with the one exception being May, which was the month where I think there was probably the greatest uncertainty around what was happening with tariffs, right. We saw it return to that double digit growth in June. That’s also an indicator, I think a similar indicator because that’s also typically a cost, a reconstruction cost that perhaps the practice will be financing.

And if they’re seeing that they think they can get that done at lower financing costs, then they’re going to do so.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. That’s helpful. And then you did some promotional activity in the second quarter. And then on the 2Q call, you talked about some positive trends in July. You talk about how things are going relative to your expectations into the second half of the year around that new cohort of customers that you’ve added?

And how is retention of those customers into the back half of the year relative to your expectations? Certainly. So, yes, I mean, what we

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: said on the second quarter call was that the promotional activity that we did in the second quarter, we believe when we look at our July results was beginning to pay dividends in terms of getting some sales growth in July. These programs are established to we identified existing customers or by customers, I mean, at least practices who are buying some merchandise from us, but at very low volumes. And we’re looking for opportunities to get greater share of wallet with those customers through this promotional activity. But we were doing it in a way such that we’re getting them to commit to purchasing from us for a period of time, whether it be a six month period up to a twelve month period, and they could earn a rebate on the tail end of that, if in fact they fulfill their commitment. We also have had some success in adding experienced field sales consultants to our sales force.

And what you can do is during that commitment period, you can work with these customers to really kind of get them to better understand what are some of these services that Henry Schein can provide them that can help them run a more profitable practices. And I’ve used this phrase often where you look at these, these are so called episodic customers usually. They buy something from us, then they might buy something from one of our competitors and then something from an online discount or they kind of work their way around looking for best price on various merchandise. But it’s our job to educate them that we can really help them run a more profitable practice as opposed to simply trying to sell them product at lowest price. That’s not really what our mission is.

And so by having them engaged with a field sales consultant, we can begin to understand, okay, what are the areas of your practice that you would like to improve? What are pain points? It’s not going to necessarily be the fact that they would like to buy certain gloves or cotton balls for a slightly lower price. Their bigger pain points are going to be what’s the reimbursement rate they’re getting from the insurance carrier? How frequently are they getting paid?

What’s the rate of their recovery of their receivables? Are they fully staffed with dental technicians and hygienists? Those are all things we can help them with. And we can get the opportunity to engage with them and get them to understand that these are areas where we can help them run a more profitable practice. We feel like we can make those customers stick.

But you need that period of time of that commitment where you can engage with them and you got to have the resources to engage with them. We feel like we’re well positioned to do that right now. We’re not going to hit on 100% of these to stick, we know that. We think we can be successful with it in a meaningful way that we can get some a meaningful increase in market share.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s very helpful. And I want to double click on something you mentioned around ramping of new field sales force personnel. Can you talk about the timing of when you started to add new employees there? And then how long does it take to ramp them maybe back to their peak sales? Or just how do you think about how long it takes when you’re adding those new hires to get back to the sales they have before?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: I think a good point of reference on this is when we hire an experienced sales rep, the expectation is that there’s they could probably bring in the short term, they can bring probably and I’m just giving you my personal estimate here, say 50% to 60% of the business that they have. We do offer these reps a guaranteed minimum commission typically for about the first twelve months that they’re with us. And so that’s, our expectation is over that twelve month period,

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: they can get back to

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: a full book of business, whether it be the customers previous customers they had or new customers that they’re able to engage in the territories they’re at.

Unidentified speaker, Host: And then the first part of that question was around like the timing of additions or is

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: it just consistent? It’s relatively consistent over the course. So there hasn’t there wasn’t like a period of time when we got a big chunk of reps came in at the same time. It’s just that our recruiting efforts been more successful. There’s been disruption in the industry.

I think everybody knows that. So, it wasn’t unusual at all for us to gain experienced reps from competitors. But we also occasionally lose experienced reps to competitors. That was a monthly report that we managed. We could see what the net number was.

That’s been a little more of a one way street most recently.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. I want to switch gears and talk about 2026 a little bit. Now you’ve been at a lot of other competitor conferences and I feel like every analyst has asked this question in a different way. And so I’ll try yet another different way to ask it. 2025, you talked about being this base year and you hope to grow at least high single digit EPS against that number into 26% or into the future.

For 2026, the Street’s at 8%. I’m not asking for guidance, but what does the model need to look like in order to achieve 8% or higher EPS growth? What are the biggest swing factors as we think about the model that would be required to get us to at least 8%?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: Yes, there’s a number of factors that we have to take into consideration when we establish guidance for ’26. And we’ll look at a variety of things that are both macro driven, as well as what’s happening specifically within the company, right. So, obviously, the foundation that we start with will be what do we think those market growth rates are. Are we seeing any kind of lift in core dental coming from the lowering of interest rates or we’ll have to monitor what’s happening with unemployment rates in The U. S.

Because that’s often the best barometer in terms of access to care. Most people are getting their health and dental insurance through their employer. And so we’ll monitor what’s happening with unemployment rates as well. But at the end of the day, what are we seeing in terms of both the run rate and market growth in dental, medical, specialty, technology? And then what should we be expecting in terms of how that then goes into ’26?

We’ll then also take a look at what do we believe is in the forecast on interest rates and what’s going to happen with interest rates and what impact might that have for us that could be beneficial into 2026. So the macro factors, interest rates, unemployment, and then those market growth. And then the things that are specific to Henry Schein, we mentioned the value creation projects in prepared remarks last month. So how is that assessment and we’re in that assessment phase right now around gross profit optimization and G and A optimization. First of all, to what extent are we do we have some level of comfort in the estimates that we can get out of that that we think we can deliver.

But what’s the timing of that delivery? How much of that will benefit 26? As we said in last month, we expect some benefits to begin in 2026 from these projects, but they will continue into 2027. So, the bulk that the full number that we expect to achieve will be achieved over a period of time. So how much of that will benefit 2026?

So those are all those would be the principal things that we’ll have to take into consideration when we’re going to establish in 2026 guidance.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, that’s helpful. And then you just touched on some of the direct cost and SG and A optimization projects. A question on KKR capstone. At a recent conference, Tom Popack said that, and I’m quoting here, there’s a lot of opportunity to consolidate back all these functions and do some offshoring. And so Ron, as we think about the comments that you and other executives at Henry Schein have made over the past couple of quarters, and you and I have talked about this for a while, but I’m curious, as you’re thinking about the relative size of the opportunities to cut costs evolved at all over the past couple of quarters?

And then related to that, what should we expect to hear on the 3Q call around that project?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: Well, you talked about the last couple of quarters. I want to make it clear that the value creation projects that we’re assessing right now are incremental to the restructuring that we announced last year, where we said we could take out 75,000,000 to $100,000,000 of costs. And we’ve identified the activities we have in place right now, we’re confident will get us to an annual run rate of approximately $100,000,000 or more of savings by the end of this year. These value creation projects are incremental to that. The restructuring we’ve done historically has been within each business unit.

You look at a business unit and you say, okay, we’ve done some acquisitions in your area, there’s some redundant costs, let’s rationalize some costs or some things we can do. And we do that in pockets. So it’s more of a grassroots effort of restructuring and it’s been effective in terms of reducing costs. What and Tom made the perfect reference to this. This value creation project is now making us kind of step back and say, okay, how can as opposed to me addressing you in your business and you in your business, how can we, you know, let’s all sit at the table, how can we share resources across all these businesses more effectively.

And that might be internal, it might be offshoring, there’s a number of things that you know, we have to explore all those opportunities. It’s been an area that a lot of companies have done successfully. And so we don’t have to necessarily reinvent the wheel here. We just have to figure out what makes most sense for us in terms of how we can establish some sustainable savings going forward.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Makes sense. And then as far as the third quarter call, should we expect what type of incremental commentary, if any, should we expect on the 3Q call or is this something that maybe at a

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: later date? I can’t promise you right now what we’ll say exactly. It’ll come down to what’s our confidence level and what’s coming out of this assessment phase. But I think that we’ll try to address some range of savings that we think can be achieved in the long term.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, that’s great. And then talking about there’s been a little bit of chatter in the channel about select price increases, the impact of tariffs. I think the ADA survey was saying that certain manufacturers or certain suppliers were raising prices. Can you talk about how widespread that has been? And then are there opportunities to shift customers?

Does this give you an opportunity to engage with customers around shipping to private label? Yes. We would love to hear how it has done that and kind of what those conversations have been like?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: Yeah, to kind of step back from it a little bit, tariffs affect us in two ways. In some cases, we are the importer of record and that is principally impacting our private label. So there’s cases where we have a contract with an OEM, who’s manufacturing our private label products, we are the importer, we’re responsible for the tariff. We have found some ways that we can defer those effects, mitigate those effects somewhat. But in some cases, it does require us to consider price increases.

We can only do those price increases if we think that the product remains competitive. And what’s happening with the branded products and what’s happening with the tariff situation with those products, right? So there’s a kind of a multifaceted dynamic there that you have to manage in order to determine what you know, when is it appropriate to increase prices or not. Then there’s a situation where our suppliers are the importer of record, they’re incurring that additional cost and then they’re determining how much of that cost they’re going to pass on to us and in turn, we have to determine how much that cost we can pass on to our customers. You put that together and what you were talking about, to what extent given the breadth of product offerings that we have, can we redirect if necessary customers products that are seeing a significant price increase to one that might they might find the pricing to be more attractive.

And we’ll have that alternative available for them. So that’s part of the strategy of this. It’s a we’ve always tried to maintain as broad of a portfolio as can. We really have kind of avoided exclusive arrangements or exclusive type of commitments, so that we have our customers can buy an alternative that, in fact, that’s better for them. And so it’s up to us to try to leverage that relationship as well as we can with our customers.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Switching gears to the specialty business, implants have been relatively robust, especially on the value side. Can you talk about how remind us how quickly are you growing How fast do think the market is growing? And then if there’s a delta between the two, can you talk about where you think that incremental share is coming from?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: Yes, implants you really have to there’s a couple of different ways of looking at this. I think we’re seeing slightly different dynamics in the premium implant market versus the value implant market. And we’re seeing slightly different dynamics in the North American market versus the European markets. I’m not intentionally, I am intentionally even at the Asian market, because we’re a very small player in the Asian market. But I’ll start with The U.

S. Where we’re seeing better growth in value implants than we are in premium implants. We’ve had a pretty good success in selling some of the new value implants that we’ve been able to add to BioHorizons portfolio through the SIN Brazil transaction.

Unidentified speaker, Host: They had

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: an FDA approved value implant and we’re selling that in The U. S. Now. Our DSO customers who are looking to expand into doing more and more specialty type of procedures, we’ve been able to work with them to train and certify their GP so that they can do implant procedures. And if they’re going to do that, they’re quite happy doing it with a value implant.

They’re typically going to do a single implant, relatively straightforward procedure that they can use a value implant. You mentioned market. I think the premium market in The U. S. Has been relatively flat.

And I think that the know, would you agree, Graham, that the value what we’re seeing on the value side from a market perspective is probably also growing a little bit. You know, so in Europe, we’re seeing, I would say a slightly steadier growth. And I do think in Europe, we’re actually taking some market share there. I think we’re seeing Camelot doing well on the premium side, and then Magento’s, which is a smaller player for us on the value side also doing well. But I think that, in Europe, there’s a little less of an out of pocket responsibility to the patient versus in The U.

S. So it a has more consistent growth product for us in Europe, as opposed to in The U. S. Where you can get some volatility coming from any kind of macroeconomic conditions because of the responsibility on the patient for a lot of the out of pocket costs here.

Unidentified speaker, Host: I’ve asked this question a couple of times to you and your peers, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of good data on it, but a large Medicare Advantage plan was paying for dental implants, and now they’re no longer paying for them. And that was a relatively material growth driver, I think, for the industry in 2024. Have you seen any impact in 2025? Is that something that you could even observe within the data? Curious if there’s anything to call out there.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: It’s hard to sort of like parse out who’s paying for what in terms of the data we have. In the overall market data, I’m sure it’s having a slight headwind. But as Rob said, The U. S. Market is probably flat to slightly down.

But one single payer isn’t going to, I don’t think, isn’t going to impact the overall market.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Got it. And then, Ronnie I’m sorry, remember as

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: well with an implant, insurer is not covering the full cost typically of the implant. So the out of pocket spend for an implant in The U. S, even if you do have insurance is fairly small. Out of pocket part is quite significant compared to what’s been insured.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Got it. That’s helpful. And then, Ron, around the DSO growth in implants, you talked about getting more GPs involved in doing implants. Can you talk about as you think about the addressable market and your DSO customers, how quickly has the addressable market of certified GPs increased? Give me whatever timeline if you have or any data on it.

Like how big of a driver is that to growth within your value implants? Well, I mean, don’t have

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: any hard data in terms of market data there, but I do when we look at our customer segmentation in terms of who are we selling implants to, and mind you, coming off a relatively low base from a couple of years ago, because DSOs weren’t buying a lot of implants then. But it’s been very good growth. And it’s the root of a lot of the growth that we’re seeing, specifically in the value implant side. Most oral surgeons out there are likely going to work with a premium implant. They’re doing more complex surgery.

And The thing to remember with a value implant versus a premium implant is that it isn’t so much that one, the premium is made with better, much better material and that’s what makes it premium. The premium really comes from assistance with surgical planning, some of the follow on service that might be necessary that an oral surgeon would want when they’re taking on a more complex procedure versus if a GP is going to take on a more straightforward single implant in a healthy patient, they can do that with a value implant because they don’t need, they don’t require all that follow on service. If they have a patient that has complicated jaw structure or certain health issues and it’s going to be a complex implant procedure, there’s a very good chance they’re still going refer that procedure to an oral surgeon, but they’re going to take on the more straightforward one. So what we’re seeing is that the expansion in the market, expansion and growth in that market tends to be more disproportionate to the value implant versus the premium.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, great.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: Is going to make those decisions optimal value based on that that are out there? Do you see any targets for you that you see right now?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: No, I mean, I don’t want to kind of get into the competitive environment just yet. At this point in the quarter, I think we’ll get a chance to see how companies come out with their results in the quarter and we’ll get a better feel for what are the trends within the various categories of implants as well as in the geographies.

Unidentified speaker, Host: And then shifting gears a little bit again around gross margins. I think we talked a lot about this on our follow-up call after the quarter. There’s a lot of moving pieces on the gross margin side. There’s glove pricing, the sales initiatives and then the shift from premium to value implants. And it’s a lot easier to see how those things are impacting the business with the new segmentation.

Can you talk about the major drivers of gross margin in the second half versus the first half? And how we should think about, in broad strokes, where that gross margin level is in the back half of the year versus the first half?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: Sure. I mean, what we mentioned in the prepared remarks is that we were expecting some stabilization in distribution gross margins going forward. Requires some stabilization in glove pricing. We did talk about we have continued to see declines in the market price of gloves, even though the costs have stabilized. But we do expect some gross margin stabilization there.

We also won’t be doing as we’re returning to a more normal level of promotion activity as we get into the second half of the year. So in terms of our own specific initiatives, that’ll have less of an impact on gross margin as well. And then you get back to mix. We had a softer quarter in the second quarter this year than the prior year. For example, some of the value added services that can be a little lumpier in revenue base, specifically our practice transitions business, which is very much like a brokerage business and is driven by volume of transactions.

And if they had fewer transactions selling, helping sell group practices to DSOs at one quarter versus another, that’s going to show up a little bit. And that’s a very high margin type of business. So product mix is also part of the equation.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Going back to the high level comments at the start of the conversation around interest rates, would lower interest rates potentially be a notable accelerant for the practice transitions business in your view? Potentially, yeah. Potentially. And if there was, is there any way to kind of quantify sort of the revenue of that specific business, the margin and how quickly that could grow if things maybe return to some type of prior time when rates were lower?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: I think it’s difficult to specifically quantify it. But I think directionally, it would be fair to expect that a meaningful decrease in interest rates could help accelerate some of the sales of practices to larger practices or to DSOs. Because one is assuming that they are financing those transactions. Right.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. And then, I want to talk about the medical business for a little bit. One of the biggest questions we get and it seems to be a very moving target type of topic is vaccine demand, both for COVID vaccine, flu. What are you seeing in the third quarter? What’s embedded in the guide?

And can you just talk about are you noticing the evolving consumer views? Obviously, the administration has their view on vaccines. How is that impacting your business? And what are your expectations that are embedded in the guide for vaccine demand?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: So, by far, the most important vaccine we sell is flu. We sell actually, we don’t sell a lot of COVID vaccine. It’s, there’s not a lot of margin in it. It’s actually a relatively difficult product to store properly and ship properly. So, there’s not a lot of we don’t sell a lot of COVID vaccine.

But flu vaccine we do. I think we’re probably the largest seller of flu vaccine to the physicians than anybody out there. My expectations are we will see a relatively normal demand for flu vaccine given that we are distributing flu vaccine through physicians, not through retail sites. And physicians are the ones who are providing advice to their patients as to if they need a vaccine or not. And so, I think our expectations are we’ll see a relatively normal vaccine season.

We’ll see. Having said that, there could be there could always be some impact. But early indications that I’ve heard is that demand will be fairly normal with the physicians. Keeping in mind that while vaccines are important product category for us, it is now, you know, a relatively small part of the business versus, say, ten, twenty years ago, when it was a greater percentage of the business, but our medical business has grown so much that it has actually become, a product category for us as opposed to what’s really driving sales there.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: It’s also relatively low, slight margin product as well. That’s a fair point. Almost COVID it’s low margin.

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: It’s also a lower margin.

Unidentified speaker, Host: It. And as we think about just broader utilization trends in the Medical segment, pricing trends, can you talk about the trajectory of those pieces? What’s embedded in the guide? And whether or not you’re seeing any change in utilization over the course of the year within that segment? Within medical itself?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: I would say no. I mean, I think when you break down what are the some of the more important product categories in our medical business, vaccines being one, pharmaceuticals being another, those are pharmaceuticals that are being we sell pharmaceuticals that are administered in the physician office, right? They tend to be restricted to injectables. So something you have to go in, you’ve got some kind of inflammatory issue and they can deal with it with a type of injectable. The physician is buying that from us and is applying it to the patients in the physician office.

So it’s pharmaceuticals, it’s point of care diagnostic kits. So, point of care diagnostic kits, you know, someone feels ill, they go to a doctor, they’re going to get tested for flu, they’re going to get tested for COVID, they’re going to get tested for strep throat, those are all diagnostic kits that we sell to the physician. I’m not expecting a significant change in the utilization of those products outside of the ordinary course of, is it a heavy flu season, is it a lighter flu season, what’s happening with respiratory illnesses and over the winter, those are all things that we track in anticipating demand for those products. And I think we’ll continue to track at the same way.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: I think in the last couple of years, the medical business has been impacted by a couple of sort of like normalization type of situations, whether it be the pricing, some shift from branded pharmaceutical products to generic pharmaceutical products, whether it’s a strong season or a weak flu season. I think probably Q2 was one of the first quarters we’ve had in a while where you can see the underlying growth in the business. I think our medical business grew about by 6%, something like that. It also includes that also includes a significant home health business, which is now at a $400,000,000 business, and that business is growing at a faster pace than the rest of the business. So the shift from the acute care setting into the alternate care setting is still taking place, albeit quarter to quarter, you can get some distortions depending on sort of like what sort of the patient traffic is.

But long term, we see this as a very, very good market.

Unidentified speaker, Host: With the last few minutes here, want to pivot to the technology business. Now at your last Investor Day, you talked about a long term goal of 8% to 12% growth for the technology business. It’s been growing slower than that in the near term. Can you talk about what is required to get that business to grow closer to those growth rates? Is it could it be solved with investment, with product or is it a market thing?

From our perspective, it seems like you have this really significant captive audience that you can go after. But what is the disconnect between that growth rate and kind of the recent growth rate that you guys have?

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: I think an important thing to look at when looking at our technology business is that its core product is the practice management system that we’ve been selling for years to the dentist now, right? And so the original product, which is still a very popular product is Dentrix, which is an on prem practice management system. And we’ve evolved and developed a product called Dentrix Ascend, which is a cloud based system that is also kind of a back office management process for the dentist. Those products are both growing easily within that 8% to 12% range that we talked about. Where we’re seeing a bit of a drag on revenue growth comes from some, I’ll say kind of a peripheral products around patient experience modules, where we’ve had kind of multiple brands.

And we’ve been looking at consolidating and we are consolidating some of those brands. We also have a product called dental plans, which is a product that essentially, you can if you don’t have dental insurance, can buy into this dental plan and participating dentists will provide you with certain services. We’re seeing some kind of stunted growth in some of those areas. So that’s kind of bringing down the growth of that segment. But the core product itself is within that eight to 12 and in some cases exceeding that eight to 12.

So that gives us a great deal of confidence there. One of the things that our Henry Schein One team has done a very good job of in the last twelve months is identifying costs that were supporting some of the products that were not growing as much and pulling back on some of those support costs that has not resulted in significant revenue changes of those products, but has increased the profitability of that segment. So you look at the second quarter result as an example. Henry Schein One had 6.6% growth in revenue, but it had over 30% growth in operating income. So they’ve learned to run a little leaner with these products that aren’t growing as fast and putting a little bit of pressure on that top line, but still delivering very good bottom line growth.

I believe that as we complete some of the things that we need to do in order to consolidate some of these other brands and other areas, we’ll begin to see the opportunity for the growth, for overall growth to get back to that, those expected growth rates.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s great. And then we have, I think three minutes left. Here’s maybe more of a meatier question around capital deployment. You recently announced a $750,000,000 share repurchase program. And if we look at just the comments you’ve made over the past few earnings calls and investor conferences, it seems like there is an opportunity to consolidate maybe some of the acquisitions you’ve done over the past few years, some of the back office functions, things like technology, things like that.

As we think about capital deployment for the next couple of years here, is it reasonable to assume a less of an emphasis on M and A given the focus of cost optimization and maybe more on things like share repurchases? Or is that not the right way to think about how you’re approaching capital deployment? Well, I don’t think we’ve changed our approach at all. But I do think that

Ron South, CFO, Henry Schein: our M and A approach has typically been opportunistic, right? We’ve always got feelers out with owner operators, where in situations where we believe they have a product or service that is complimentary to what we do and makes Henry Schein a better company. And we’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to be opportunistic. We also see opportunities with share repurchase in that we believe we will have a depressed share price right now.

And so we have been a little more aggressive in share repurchases in the first half of this year. So getting the authorization from the board for an additional $750,000,000 of share repurchases really gives us that option, right. If we are in a period where we are we don’t see as many M and A opportunities, we have the opportunity to deploy more capital to share repurchases, especially when the shares are trading, we see that as an opportunity. And so that was the discussion with the Board was, we wanted to have we want to make sure we maintain the option doing that with capital and the Board was very supportive of that.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: That’s

Unidentified speaker, Host: great. So I think we’re out of time. Ron, Graham, thank you so much for the time and thank you everyone in the audience for joining us today.

Graham Stanley, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Financial Products Officer, Henry Schein: Thank you. Thanks for hosting us. Thanks.

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