Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA (NYSE:FMS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 20, 2024

Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.44, expectations were $0.36. Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the report on the Fourth Quarter 2023 Conference call. I'm Andrea, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Dominik Heger, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Dominik Heger: Thank you, Andrea. Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are. I would also like to welcome you to our earnings call for the fourth quarter 2023 for the first time at 2 p.m. As always, I need to start out the call by mentioning our caution language that is in our safe harbor statement, as well as in our presentation and in all the materials that we have distributed earlier today. For further details concerning risks and uncertainties, please refer to these documents and to our SEC filings. With the Q4 results, we traditionally share an update on our strategic plan. Therefore, we have more to cover than in the other quarters. Given that we only have the 60 minutes, we need to limit the number of questions again to two in order to give everyone the chance to ask questions.

It would be great if we could make this work again. With us today is Helen Giza, our CEO and Chair of Management Board, and Martin Fischer, our CFO. Helen will start with an update on our execution against our strategic plan. Martin will provide a review of the fourth quarter, and Helen will finish the prepared remarks with our outlook. Then, we are happy to take your questions. With that, Helen, the floor is yours.

Helen Giza: Thank you, Dominik, and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining our presentation today and for your continued interest in Fresenius Medical Care. I'll begin my prepared remarks on Slide 4. A year ago, we laid out our strategic plan to turnaround and transform Fresenius Medical Care. This plan included ambitious structural, operational and cultural changes. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our teams around the world, we have successfully executed on our commitment of fundamental transformation, making progress against all facets of our plan. We have done what we said we would do. A lot of the change we have undertaken would not have been possible without the implementation of our new operating model at the start of 2023.