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Text: Joining in the Q&A after Bob and Mike's comments will be Jacob Thaysen, President of Agilent's Life Science and Applied Markets Group; Sam Raha, President of Agilent's Diagnostics and Genomics Group; and Padraig McDonnell, President of the Agilent CrossLab Group.
You will find the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations on our website.
Core revenue growth excludes the impact of currency and the acquisitions and divestitures completed within the past 12 months.
Before I get into the detail -- into the quarterly details, I want to start by recognize our Agilent India team.
Despite the challenging COVID-19 situation, our India team is working closely with our cause of do while we can to help in this time of extreme need.
In addition our Agilent India customer support, finance and IT teams have worked tiredlessly to help us close out the second quarter and keep us moving forward.
I could not be more proud of how the team has worked together in true one Agilent fashion.
Our thoughts go out the entire Agilent India team and their families during this difficult time.
In Q2 the strong momentum in our business continues against the backdrop of a recovering market.
The Agilent team delivered another outstanding quarter exceeding our expectations, both revenue and earnings are up sharply versus a solid Q2 last year when revenue and earnings per share were relatively flat.
Our growth is broad-based across all business groups, markets and geographies.
We are also expanding margins driving faster earnings-per-share growth.
Revenues for the quarter are $1.525 billion.
This is up 23% on a reported basis and up 19% core.
COVID-19 related revenues accounted for roughly 2% of overall revenues as expected and contributes about 1 point to our overall growth.
Our revenue growth is not a one quarter or easy compare story, but one that sustained above market growth.
For example, our Q2 revenues are up more than 17% core from two years ago.
Q2 operating margin of 23.9%.
This is up 150 basis points.
EPS of $0.97 is up 37% year-over-year.
Like our recent acquisitions in Cell Analysis, Resolution Bioscience an example of our build and buy growth strategy in action.
The Agilent story remains the same.
It is a story of one team outpacing the market to deliver strong broad-based growth in an environment of continuing market recovery.
Moving onto our end market highlights, we do strongly in all markets.
Our growth is led by 29% growth in pharma and 22% in food.
We are seeing improving growth in the chemical and energy market with 14% growth.
We also posted low-teens growth in diagnostics and over 20% growth in academia and government.
Lastly, environmental forensics grew 8%.
Bob will provide end market detail later in his comments.
Geographically, the Americas led the way with 27% growth.
Strength in China, Europe and the Rest of Asia continues with all growing in the mid-teens.
The 30% growth in China is on top of 4% growth last year when the business started to recover from the pandemic.
As we look at our performance by business group, the Life Sciences Applied Markets Group generated revenues of $674 million during the quarter.
LSAG is up 28% on reported basis and up 25% core off a 7% decline last year.
LSAG's growth is broad-based across all end markets and geographies.
Our focus in investments in fast growing end markets continues to pay off.
The LSAG Pharma business is very strong, growing 41% with strength in both biopharma and small molecule.
From a product perspective, we saw strength in liquid chromatography and LCMS along with continued growth in Cell Analysis.
During the quarter, Cell Analysis grew 34% with our BioTek business growing close to 40%.
During the quarter the LSAG team also contribute to our long-term companywide focus on sustainability in advance and important ESG initiatives.
LSAG announced several new products that have earned the highly respected accountability, consistency and transparency, ACT label from My Green Lab.
My Green Lab is a non-profit organization dedicated to improve the sustainability of the scientific research.
LSAG products will also receive two Scientist Choice Awards and now for the Select Science Virtual Analytical Summit.
Our Cell Analysis business during the quarter -- in our Cell Analysis business during the quarter, excuse me, we launched our Cytation C10 Confocal Imaging Reader, a multi-functional automated system focused on research labs and core facilities looking for increased productivity.
This product builds on the BioTek cell imaging leadership with the Cytation multimode leader and expands our reach in the strategic business.
While still early, customer feedback has been extremely positive.
We are also very pleased with the progress and trajectory of our Cell Analysis business overall and see a very positive future for this space.
The Agilent Cross Lab Group posted revenues of $536 million.
This is up a reported 19% and up 15% on the core basis versus a 1% increase last year.
ACG's growth is driven by demand for consumables and services across the portfolio as lab actively continues to increase for our customers.
This is leading to more on-demand services and parts consumption.
Revenues from our contract business continues to drive strong growth due to the high level of contract renewals seen in the previous quarter.
Our strong instrument placements and the increase in installed base will benefit the ACG business going forward.
At the same time our digital investments continue to pay off with continued strong customer uptake and consumables and our digitally enabled services offerings.
Our LSAG and ACG businesses come together in the iLab.
This is where we believe we are well positioned to continue driving above market growth as we build on our market leading portfolio, strong service organization and outstanding customer service.
For the Diagnostics Genomics Group revenues were $315 million, up 20% reported and up 16% core versus the 5% increase last year.
Growth is broad-based, led by our NASD oligo and genomics businesses.
Demand for our NASD offerings remains strong and our capacity expansion plans for a high-growth NASD business remain on track.
We're very pleased with the acquisition of Resolution Bioscience during the quarter with our liquid biopsy technology, Resolution Bioscience is the key player in a very exciting area of cancer diagnostics.
We are very glad to have them on the Agilent team.
I'm confident as time goes on.
, You'll be hearing more and more from us on this business and its contributions.
I would now like to recap the second quarter and take a look forward.
The strong momentum in our business continues.
This is being driven by our relentless customer focus, the strength of our portfolio and the execution capabilities of the one Agilent team.
Our build and buy growth strategy is delivering as intended of above market growth.
Over the last year, I've often said, that Agilent's focused on coming out of the pandemic even stronger as a company.
I believe you're seeing the impact of this approach in our current results.
As we look ahead we do so with a sense about optimism and confidence.
We are optimistic, because of the continued market recovery and the strength of our portfolio.
We are confident, because we have the right team, customer focused, operationally excellent and driven to win.
As a result we are once again raising our full-year revenue and earnings guidance.
Bob will share more details, but we expect that a continuation of excellent top line growth.
We also expect to compare this strong top line into excellent earnings growth and cash generation.
During our Investor Event in December, we discussed our shareholder value creation model and our goals for increasing long-term growth and expanding margins.
Six months into fiscal 2021 we are well on our way to achieving those objectives.
Our build and buy growth strategy is delivering.
The one-Agilent team continues to demonstrate its execution prowess and strong drive to win.
We raised the bar on customer service and continue to exceed customer expectations in providing industry-leading products and services.
While we are yet to fully emerge from the global pandemic, we are looking forward to the future with both optimism and confidence.
I will now hand the call off to Bob.
In my remarks today, I'll provide some additional details on Q2 revenue and take you through the income statement and some other key financial metrics.
I'll then finish up with our updated outlook for the year and the third quarter.
Revenue for the second quarter was $1.525 billion, reflecting reported growth of 23%.
Core revenue growth was 19%, while currency contributed just under 4 points of growth.
We are very pleased with our second quarter results as we saw strong broad-based growth with all three business groups posting mid-teens growth or higher and all end markets growing strongly.
From an end market perspective, our focus on fast growing markets is paying off.
Pharma, our largest market, again led the way delivering 29% growth.
This is on top of growing 5% last year.
Growth was led by Cell Analysis LC and mass spec.
These tools are delivering critical capabilities to our biopharma customers as they continue to make investments to develop new therapies and vaccines.
Our Biopharma business grew roughly 40% and represented over 35% of our Pharma business in the quarter.
Our Small Molecule segment also has momentum, growing in the mid 20s in the quarter.
Overall, we are well positioned within Pharma and expect the Pharma market to continue to be the strongest end-market as we enter the second half of the year.
The food market continued its strong performance, growing 22%.
We experienced strong growth across all regions and segments as we continue to see global investments across the entire food supply chain.
And we were very pleased to see the non-COVID diagnostics businesses continue to improve throughout the quarter, growing 13% as routine doctor visits return closer to pre-pandemic levels.
We posted a very strong month in the diagnostics and clinical market as we came to anniversary, the weak April we experienced in our large markets at the onset of the pandemic last year.
And we exited the quarter with testing volumes at a run rate slightly higher than pre-pandemic level.
The chemical and energy market continues to recover as we grew 14% of a decline of 10% last year.
Our results were primarily driven by continued strength in the chemicals and materials markets and in a positive sign, our order growth rates were ahead of revenues and finished the quarter strong leading us to believe this trend will continue.
We also saw a nice recovery in the academia and government market as non-COVID related labs resume operations in a strong funding environment.
With the increase in activity, our business grew 21% against the weakest comparison of the year.
We would expect the academia and government market to continue to recover throughout the rest of the year.
And lastly, the environmental and forensics market saw high single-digit growth driven by the Americas, services and consumables at Atomic Spectroscopy.
On a geographic basis, all regions grew led by the Americas at 27%, the pharma and academia and government markets in Americas grew in the low 30% range and all markets grew at least 20%.
Europe experienced 16% growth led by food, academia and government and C&E.
Those three markets all grew more than 20%.
And as Mike noted, China grew 13% after growing 4% last year.
This was driven by pharma growth in the high 30s.
Our growth in orders outpaced revenue growth by mid single-digits during the quarter.
Now turning to the rest of the P&L.
Second quarter gross margin was 55.4% flat year-on-year, despite a headwind of more than 30 basis points from currency.
Our operating margin for the second quarter came in at 23.9%, driven by volume, this is up a solid 150 basis points from last year, even as we saw increased spending as activity ramped and we invest in the future.
Strong top line growth coupled with our operating leverage helped deliver earnings per share of $0.97, up 37% versus last year.
Our tax rate was 14.75% and our share count was 307 million shares.
Now on to cash flow and the balance sheet.
Our performance translated into very strong cash flows.
We delivered $472 million in operating cash flow during the quarter, up more than 50% from last year.
The strong cash flow has continued to help drive our balanced capital deployment strategy.
During the quarter we returned $254 million to our shareholders, paying out $59 million in dividends and repurchasing 1.55 million shares for $195 million.
And as Mike mentioned, we also continue to strategically invest in the business, We spent a net of $547 million to purchase Resolution Bioscience and invested $31 million in capital expenditures.
Year-to-date, we returned $657 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases, while reinvesting in the business by spending $619 million on M&A and capital expenditures.
And we ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, which enables us to enjoy financial flexibility going forward.
During the quarter, we raised $850 million in long-term debt at very favorable terms, redeemed $300 million that was maturing next year and reduced our ongoing interest expense.
We ended the quarter with $1.4 billion in cash, $2.9 billion in outstanding debt and a net leverage ratio of 1 time.
Now turning to the outlook for the full year and the third quarter.
We see a great opportunity to build on our strong first half results.
Looking forward, while the pandemic is still with us, we continue to see recovery in our end markets and have solid momentum in all of our businesses.
As a result, we are again increasing our full year projections for both revenue and earnings per share.
This reflects our strong Q2 results an increasing expectations for the second half of the year.
We are also incorporating the Resolution Bioscience into our guidance.
For revenue, we are increasing our full-year range to a range of $6.15 billion to $6.21 billion, up nearly $320 million at the midpoint and representing reported growth of 15% to 16% and core growth of 12% to 13%.
Included is roughly 3 points of currency and 0.5 point attributable to M&A.
This increased outlook also reflects continued growth in our end markets.
We see sustained momentum in the second half of the year in pharma, food and environmental and forensic markets.
End markets that we expect to continue to recover in the second half include the Diagnostics and Clinical, academia and government and C&E.
As Mike mentioned during our Investor Event in December, we provided a long-range plan of annual margin expansion in the range of 50 to 100 basis points.
Our updated guidance for the year exceeds the top end of that range.
And in addition, we are increasing our fiscal 2021 non-GAAP earnings per share to a range of $4.09 to $4.14 per share.
This is growth of 25% to 26% for the year.
Now for the third fiscal quarter, we're expecting revenue to range from $1.51 billion to $1.54 billion, representing reported growth of 20% to 22% and core growth of 15% to 17.5%.
And we expect third quarter non-GAAP earnings per share to be in the range of $0.97 to $0.99 per share with growth of 24% to 27%.
We believe our strategies and our execution of driving the strong results we've achieved and put us in a great position to continue to drive strong results for the remainder of the year.
With that Ruben back to you for Q&A.
Gabriel, if you could please provide instructions for the Q&A.

user
q2 non-gaap earnings per share $0.97.
sees q3 revenue $1.51 billion to $1.54 billion.
sees fy revenue $6.15 billion to $6.21 billion.
q2 revenue $1.525 billion versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $1.4 billion.
agilent technologies - fy 2021 non-gaap earnings guidance has increased to range of $4.09 to $4.14 per share.

assistant