You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: We have a lot of exciting news to discuss today.
The first discusses our second quarter results of fiscal 2021.
The second announces our intention to spin-off our diabetes business into a separate public company.
Given the announcement of the spin-off of our diabetes business, we will also have Dev Kurdikar, our Worldwide President of Diabetes Care, who has been named CEO of NewCo to provide his early thoughts on the transaction.
We will also be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures with respect to our performance.
Unless otherwise specified all comparisons will be on a year-over-year basis versus relevant period.
To avoid any confusion, when we refer to any given period, whether that's on a quarter or year basis, we will be referring to the period in fiscal terms, unless we specifically call it out as a calendar period.
Finally, when we refer to NewCo, during today's call we are referring to the independent publicly traded diabetes company following the effective date of the spin, while RemainCo refers to BD post separation.
Today we will provide an update on how we are executing on creating value for our stakeholders through our BD 2025 strategy.
We have a lot of exciting updates for you, so let's jump right in.
Our second quarter results came in better than expected and we delivered strong revenue and earnings per share growth.
We are very pleased with the continued momentum in our core business, and therefore, based on our first half results and our projections for the second half we are reaffirming our fiscal 2021 guidance.
We are making steady progress on each of our growth initiatives, which include very purposely shifting our investments and portfolio into higher-growth categories and shifting our weighted average market growth rate over time.
We are advancing our product pipeline as well as our tuck-in M&A strategy, which now includes making selective investments in earlier stage and potentially disruptive technologies.
We see this planned spin as a significant value-creating opportunity for all stakeholders for our patients, customers, associates and shareholders.
As an independent public company, we believe the diabetes business can leverage its global leadership position and unleash its growth potential in this attractive market category through the more efficient allocation of its own capital.
For RemainCo BD, this transaction allows us to focus on our prioritized core businesses.
We expect this transaction to strengthen our mid single-digit revenue and double-digit total return growth profile.
We expect the spin to be completed in the first half of calendar year 2022 subject to customary closing conditions, including final approval by the BD Board of Directors and the SEC declaring our registration statement effective.
We are progressing well against our simplification initiatives, which are focused on reducing complexity, enhancing our product quality, refining our customer experience and improving cost efficiencies.
Our recode initiatives are progressing on track to generate savings of $300 million by the end of FY FY '24.
And these initiatives help unlock value and allow us the flexibility to reinvest back into our business to fuel future growth.
Chris will talk more about our capital allocation strategy later in the call, but we expect share repurchases to return as part of a more balanced capital allocation strategy, as our balance sheet position and cash flows have strengthened over the past year.
We also continue to be guided by our purpose of advancing the world of health and continue to make great progress on our ESG initiatives.
On Earth Day, we reaffirmed our climate change targets, which includes our pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040 across our direct operations.
Last week as I was preparing for our Board meeting, I reflected on where we were a year ago where we are today and the progress we've made.
First, we achieved my number one priority since taking over as CEO.
Last week, we announced that we submitted our Alaris 510(k) premarket notification.
This is an important milestone in our commitment to our customers and our patients.
The Alaris pump is the leading infusion pump in the US market administering more than one million infusions each day.
Second, we've significantly strengthened our balance sheet and cash flows.
Over the past year we've improved our net leverage ratio by a full turn from 3.4x to 2.4x and taken actions to meaningfully strengthen our cash flows.
Third, we answered the call to action with COVID.
We developed a series of innovative COVID diagnostic tests and scaled these to diagnose patients and help control the spread.
We secured our global supply chain to ensure that our essential medical devices were available to treat COVID patients in ICUs around the world including BD devices used in the treatment of an estimated 90% of US ICU patients.
And today we continue to add capacity and enable over 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to be delivered using our injection devices.
I am very proud of our team's impact when it matters most.
Fourth, we reinvested in growth.
We set up the BD Innovation and Growth Fund and advanced impactful new innovation programs in each of our businesses.
We acquired 11 tuck-in acquisitions since the beginning of 2020 along with early stage investments and we're reinvesting some of BD Veritor profits back into the business and behind our BD 2025 strategy.
Fifth, we started to shift the BD culture to one of a growth mindset.
We've been systematically advancing our leadership capabilities and culture in this area which includes partnering with the Neuro Leadership Institute to embed an enhanced focus on innovation and growth across our culture and mindset and the progress we're making with shifting the culture is very real and tangible.
And today, we are announcing our intention to spin-off the diabetes business.
We believe this spin-off will be another value-creating opportunity for our shareholders.
But what excites me most is not what we've done it's where we're going and what's to come over the next several years all of our future successes and milestones to come.
The BD 2025 value-creation story has only just begun.
And later this year we are planning to host an Investor Day and we'll look forward to sharing greater insights into our 2025 strategy and pipeline.
Chris is going to run through our financial results in greater detail later on.
But just to highlight, we are very pleased with our second quarter results as the BD team continued to execute well.
Our second quarter revenues totaled $4.9 billion, up 15.4% on a reported basis and up 12.2% on an FX-neutral basis.
I was particularly pleased with the continued momentum of our core businesses which were above our expectations in all three business segments.
To call out a few, our market-leading BD Pharmaceutical Systems business continues to deliver robust revenue growth of nearly 10%.
Medication Delivery Solutions business was up over 8%, as we continue to deliver on our COVID vaccine injection devices commitments and our results were also driven by higher patient acuity.
Our Bioscience business turned in double-digit growth as research activity has rebounded and urology and critical care continued to perform well driven by PureWick and targeted temperature management.
In China, where we began to anniversary the impact of COVID-19 we saw a strong revenue growth of 62% and we continue to invest support our future growth including reinvesting some of the profits from our COVID diagnostics.
Our R&D spending was up 18.7% year-over-year on a currency-neutral basis.
Adjusted earnings per share was $3.19 representing year-over-year growth of 25.1% on a reported and 22.7% on a currency-neutral basis.
The performance of our business particularly our core, gives us comfort to reaffirm our fiscal 2021 guidance ranges which include currency-neutral revenue growth of 10% to 12% and adjusted earnings per share guidance of $12.75 to $12.85, up 25% to 26% on a year-over-year basis.
Turning to slide 9.
As I discussed before, we are proud to play such an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic response, across the continuum of care, from diagnostics to treatment and now prevention.
As vaccination campaigns continue to progress, I am pleased to announce, that we now have cumulative commitments for over 1.7 billion injection devices to administer COVID vaccines globally.
These commitments will stretch through our fiscal 2022 period.
And therefore, we now see higher demand in our MDS hypodermic business, as being durable into next year.
We also see potential opportunity for our prefilled business in the future, and are now working with several partners at various stages of formulation testing on possible pre-filled COVID-19 vaccines.
Turning to slide 10.
I will provide an update on our COVID-19 Diagnostic Testing business.
We recently announced several emergency use authorizations or EUAs from the FDA.
We received EUAs for our combination COVID flu assays for both BD Veritor and BD MAX and we believe combination tests are going to be important in the next flu season.
Next, we extended our EUA for the BD Veritor COVID-19 test to include a claim for screening asymptomatic individuals by serial testing.
Several peer-reviewed publications have supported the benefits of serial rapid antigen testing, and we are continuing to develop our BD Veritor at-home test.
Our test is designed to deliver a clear, digitally displayed record of test results on a smartphone to eliminate the reading guess work, and we also designed it to allow the data to be digitally shared by the user to eliminate errors and report sharing.
Our BD Veritor at-home antigen test is also expected to have some other features that we believe will further differentiate it versus others on the market.
Our antigen tests will all be manufactured on the same production lines to leverage economies of scale and our capital investments.
Turning to slide 11.
Growth through innovation is central to our BD 2025 strategy.
We are advancing our R&D pipeline across all three of our segments.
And as you can see on this slide identified by the green circles, several products have launched or achieved clearance since the beginning of the year.
I've already covered our regulatory clearances related to COVID Diagnostics, and I'm happy to share that we've made steady progress in our medical segment, with a healthy cadence of relevant portfolio expansions and extensions across the MDS portfolio, such as the broadening of our leading peripheral IV catheter position with the introduction of our first passive safety catheter in the United States, the BD Cathena IV safety catheter.
We launched a new catheter stabilization solution for peripheral IV catheters with the BD Secura stabilization device and further advanced the safety of the BD PhaSeal optimal product family with a locking injector.
In interventional, we're launching Sensica, a smart connected folly catheter, which can be an important tool for the ICU.
It provides weight-normalized urine output data that is one of the early parameters used by clinicians to help identify acute kidney injury.
BD Sensica can wirelessly transmit this data to the hospital's electronic medical record.
We're also looking forward to launching Pristine later this quarter.
Pristine is our new long-term hemodialysis catheter with unique side hole-free symmetric wide tip distal lumen design.
The design of the product is intended to help minimize thrombus adhesion, facilitate blood clot aspiration prior to hemodialysis treatment and help minimize recirculation rates in both forward and reverse.
Turning to slide 12.
As I have often said over the last year, Alaris was my number one priority and last week, we announced a very important milestone.
We submitted our 510(k) premarket notification to the FDA for our BD Alaris system.
I am extremely proud of our MMS regulatory affairs, quality and R&D teams for their dedication and hard work, to ensure a comprehensive submission.
We're also very appreciative of the FDA's collaboration.
We recognize this is one important step and we look forward to working with them through the FDA review process to obtain clearance for the updated BD Alaris system.
Just to give a sense of what is included in the submission and how comprehensive it is.
The 510(k) submission is intended to bring our file up to date for all changes to the pump, since the last 510(k) was cleared.
We are also implementing updated features and addressing open recall issues, including through a new version of the BD Alaris system software that will provide clinical, operational and cybersecurity updates.
These updates are part of our overall commitment to safeguard infusion programming.
And included in the software will be updates to our BD Alaris Guardrail Suite and BD Alaris EMR interoperability, including cybersecurity updates, network security and advanced data encryption.
From a hardware perspective, our submission includes updated PCU, LVP, syringe and EtCO2 modules, as well as our existing PCA module.
We plan to continue to advance the BD, Alaris system with future updates and subsequent submissions.
We filed a substantial amount of data to support the filing.
This is a complex and comprehensive submission.
Therefore, we would expect that the FDA review process will take some time to complete.
And while we're not intending to predict the FDA-specific time line, we certainly recognize that our stakeholders would like to have some input for modeling purposes and we believe it would be prudent to think about Alaris' clearance sometime during the second half of our fiscal year 2022.
We plan to update you if there are any significant developments.
And for now, we expect to continue to ship to our customers who qualify under medical necessity.
We've learned a lot of valuable lessons and gained insights during this journey that we're applying to our ongoing next-generation pump platform programs as well as our quality and risk management systems.
Turning to Slide 13.
We are making significant progress with our tuck-in M&A strategy.
Year-to-date, we've closed five acquisitions and we have a robust funnel of opportunities at various stages.
We continue to exercise financial discipline, in addition to ensuring deals meet our strategic and operational criteria.
This includes them being accretive to our growth profile, supporting our key innovation themes, advancing our strategic positions, meeting our financial hurdles and creating shareholder value.
As part of building a more holistic approach to expanding our inorganic growth funnel, we also expanded our evaluation and selective investment in early stage strategic opportunities.
On Slide 14, we highlight our key innovation themes and with some of our tuck-in acquisitions and R&D products across our three business segments that align to these themes, some of which I've already highlighted.
So within this theme of applying smart devices, robotics, analytics and artificial intelligence to improve care processes, I've already discussed our Smart Foley catheter Sensica.
We also continue to develop new modules of Kiestra, our total lab automation system.
Kiestra as you know can improve standardization, significantly enhance lab efficiencies and staff productivity.
Within Medical, our health site platform is designed to continue to support enterprisewide medication management.
We continue to evolve our capabilities with health site diversions, which was originally launched in fiscal 2019 for Pyxis.
We have scaled tremendously over the last year in terms of our commercial sites and we have plans to expand into the OR, followed by integration of infusion data and central pharmacy.
Within this theme of enabling new care settings, you've seen us acquire Med Bank and GSL Solutions to expand our medication management offering into the faster-growth non-acute settings and strengthen our existing dispensing leadership position.
Our PureWick dry dock urine collection system has been helping women with urinary incontinence outside of the acute setting and contributing to the strong growth in our UCC franchise.
And I've already talked about how we're excited about the upcoming launch of our BD Veritor at-home COVID-19 test that enables the expansion of testing into everyday settings.
Lastly our third theme is improving diagnosis and treatment of chronic diseases.
I already mentioned Pristine and I've talked about in the past our BD Oncology HPV assay, which offers extended genotyping that supports risk stratification.
And we look forward to launching this assay on our BD core system in the United States later this year.
One other product that we haven't talked a lot about is our BD Libertas subcutaneous drug delivery system for the administration of viscous biologics.
Our Pharmaceutical Systems business is excited to offer this option to our biopharmaceutical partners as a combination product.
These products not only add value to our customers, patients and healthcare system but they add to our confidence in a sustainable, durable, mid-single-digit growth profile.
Now turning to Slide 15.
And I'm really excited today to announce a bold step in our BD 2025 strategy.
Our intention to spin-off our diabetes business to our shareholders which we believe is a value-creating transaction.
Our Diabetes Care business generated $1.1 billion of revenue in fiscal 2020, is a global leader in insulin injection devices.
Consistent with our continuing focus on delivering shareholder value, we undergo strategic reviews to identify ways to create value and determine that the strategic priorities of BD have diverged from those of our Diabetes Care business.
We believe a spin-off will position both companies for long-term growth and success by allowing both to focus on their respective core markets, innovations and customer outcomes.
Each company will be able to more efficiently allocate its resources and capital, best positioning the respective companies for their success and value creation.
We see tremendous potential to create value for our Diabetes Care business ahead.
We see the spin-off as an operating catalyst for our Diabetes Care business.
As an independent public company, NewCo will be able to more effectively allocate its human, operational and financial resources to implement a refined growth strategy that will allow it to focus on innovation, and improving the care of patients living with diabetes.
Being a separate entity, will also better enable NewCo to attract and retain talent, align management and employee incentives, and have a stock currency that it can use for future acquisitions.
For RemainCo BD, we expect the spin-off to strengthen our mid-single-digit FX-neutral revenue growth.
We estimate the uplift to our revenue growth rate to be about 30 basis points.
And see this as strengthening our double-digit total return growth profile.
The spin-off will allow RemainCo to focus on our R&D tuck-in M&A and customer growth strategies, simplify our overall focus and maintain financial flexibility.
Considering all of these benefits, we believe this transaction has the potential to create value for our shareholders, which will be owners of both companies.
Slide 17, provides an overview of the relevant transaction details.
And I've already covered many of these topics.
The spin-off is expected to be implemented by a means of a distribution of 100% of the shares of a newly traded -- publicly traded entity to BD shareholders, and is intended to be tax-free for U.S. federal income tax purposes.
Over the next several months, we'll be filing our Form 10, which will include the carve-out financial statements.
Again, we expect the spin-off to be completed in the first half of fiscal year 2022, subject to market, regulatory and other conditions, including final approval by the Board of Directors and the effectiveness of a Form 10 registration statement that will be filed with the SEC.
Turning to slide 18, NewCo will be led by an experienced management team.
And I am very pleased to share that Dev Kurdikar, who joined us earlier this year, as the Worldwide President of Diabetes Care will be the CEO of NewCo.
Dev has a long history, in the medtech sector, most recently serving as the CEO of Cardiac Science.
Dev has been engaged with the business now for the last few months and will share some of his preliminary thoughts in a moment.
I'm also very happy to announce that Jake Elguicze, the Former Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations of Teleflex, has joined BD and will be the CFO of NewCo upon spin.
Jake brings extensive experience, in treasury, financial planning, reporting and analysis and investor relations.
We're confident that Dev and Jake are the right team, to lead NewCo as they embark on this journey that we believe will create value for all stakeholders.
I'm incredibly excited to embark on this journey.
I see a tremendous opportunity to build shareholder value and advance care for patients who suffer from diabetes.
I'm also very humbled, to be leading this amazing organization.
The Diabetes Care business has a long history of caring for patients living with the disease, dating back to BD's introduction of the world's first specialized insulin syringe, almost 100 years ago in 1924.
Since then, BD has played a leading role in the delivery of insulin, including helping to drive the adoption of insulin pens, which utilize our pen needle technology, as a leading modality for insulin injection.
Our Diabetes Care business now reaches more diabetic patients, than any other medical device company in the world today.
We manufacture eight billion devices per year and are the global leader in insulin injection devices.
As Tom mentioned earlier, the business generated nearly $1.1 billion in revenue in fiscal 2020, derived from the sale of insulin injection devices such as, pen needles and insulin syringes as well as other accessories.
One factor that attracted me to this opportunity was the global breadth of the business with 48% of the revenues generated outside the United States, including 17% in emerging markets.
And why is this important?
As you can see on slide 21, diabetes is a growing chronic condition across the globe, with some of the higher prevalence rates expected to be in the emerging market regions.
The International Diabetes Federation estimates that the number of adults living with diabetes is expected to grow from 463 million in 2019 to 578 million in 2030 and 700 million by 2045.
Most of these patients will likely continue to rely on traditional injection devices for their insulin needs.
The rapid growth of the disease will likely place a significant burden on healthcare systems around the world, as patients with diabetes are often afflicted with multiple co-morbidities like cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetic retinopathy and lower limb complications.
While I've only been with the company for a few months now, I can assure you that my passion and vision for NewCo is one of growth.
Injection devices like pen needle and syringes are likely to remain a key part of their treatment paradigm for people with diabetes on a global basis for the foreseeable future.
We will look to leverage our global footprint to capitalize on these demographic trends.
However, we'll also look to invest in novel insulin delivery technologies, including our internal type 2 patch technologies.
We also plan to supplement our internal R&D product development efforts more broadly and accelerate our growth profile through strategic M&A to broaden our product offerings and enter adjacencies on new growth categories.
Let me end by saying how excited and humbled I am to have this opportunity to lead NewCo.
I am confident that our team will work tirelessly to advance care for our patients while building shareholder value.
We see this as a great opportunity for those BD associates that will be part of NewCo and we're happy to have you and Jake on board.
Turning to slide 25.
I'd like to provide an update on our ESG initiatives across BD.
Over the past quarter, we continued to advance our companywide ESG initiatives, including our recent commitment to be carbon neutral across direct operations by 2040.
We also continue to make progress toward identifying our 2030 goals and we look forward to sharing more details behind our 2030 sustainability plan with you in future engagements.
Before turning it over to Chris, I want to say again how proud I am of the organization for the progress we've made in advancing the BD 2025 strategy.
We are purposely shifting our focus to growth opportunities.
Simplifying the organization to remove complexity as I firmly believe complexity gets in the way of growth and we're empowering our associates with a growth mindset.
We are committed to doing the right things, the right way and fulfilling our purpose of advancing the world of health.
I also want to reiterate how excited I am for what's ahead for both RemainCo BD and NewCo.
BD's Board of Directors and management team believe our plans to spin-off the Diabetes Care business will create value for all stakeholders.
And before I turn to the results, let me also share my enthusiasm for the spin-off of our Diabetes Care business.
I see the transaction is a win-win for all stakeholders, our shareholders, our employees, our customers and our patients.
I'm confident that we have the right leadership to navigate NewCo on this exciting journey ahead.
Now let me turn to the second quarter financial results.
Slide 27 summarizes our high-level revenue performance.
Our revenues came in just over $4.9 billion, up 15.4% on a reported basis and up 12.2% on an FX-neutral basis.
As Tom mentioned, we were very pleased with our results.
Our core segment results excluding COVID-19 diagnostic testings were ahead of our expectations across all segments.
Now turning to slide 28.
Our medical segment delivered 4.7% FX-neutral revenue growth led by our market leading BD Pharmaceutical Solutions Systems business, which continues to deliver robust revenue growth of nearly 10%.
We are proceeding with our capacity expansion to support the future growth of this business unit.
MDS grew a solid 8.1%, which included $43 million from COVID-19 vaccination injection device revenues.
We also benefited from higher patient acuity and higher utilization internationally particularly in China where we anniversaried the impact of COVID-19.
Now turning to slide 29.
Our Life Science segment delivered revenue growth of nearly 38% on an FX neutral basis.
Our COVID-19 diagnostic testing revenues totaled $480 million and are included in our Integrated Diagnostics Solutions business.
While BD Veritor ASPs were as expected in the low to mid-teens, the market's overall demand for symptomatic COVID diagnostic testing was lower.
Looking at our IDS business excluding COVID testing, our routine diagnostic testing has not yet fully recovered to pre-COVID-19 levels.
There was virtually no traditional flu this year, so we did not have our usual flu test revenues and this impacted our IDS growth rate by 540 basis points and our BD Life Sciences growth rate by 410 basis points.
The impact to our overall BD growth rate was 110 basis points.
Our Biosciences business unit delivered strong growth of over 12% as research lab activity has recovered nicely.
We are seeing strong demand for research instruments and reagents as well as from biopharmaceutical companies for vaccine research and development.
As shown on slide 30, the BD Interventional segment was flat this quarter, which was better than expected given the COVID-19 resurgences.
The performance in surgery and PI reflected the early impact from the COVID resurgence.
However, we did see recovery in elective procedures as the quarter progressed and this trend has continued into April.
Our urology and critical care franchise continues to deliver solid growth led by our Purewick and targeted temperature management product lines.
Turning to our results by geographic regions on slide 31.
In the United States, revenues were up 1.9%.
As we had discussed on our February earnings call, we did see some early impact from COVID-19 resurgence, which waned as the quarter progressed and we exited March with improved momentum and this continued in April.
International revenues were up 25.7% on a currency-neutral basis as we begin to anniversary the initial impact of COVID-19, particularly in China where our revenues were up 62%.
We also benefited from our COVID-19 responses, our diagnostic testing and vaccine injection delivery device revenues.
Now turning to the P&L on slide 32.
As expected our gross margin was sequentially lower as compared to our first quarter.
Our gross margin was 53.8% driven mostly by the lower COVID diagnostic testing revenues.
On a year-over-year basis, the gross margin included a 70 basis point negative impact from foreign exchange and 70 basis points from reinvestment initiatives.
Favorable impacts from our continuous improvement initiatives were offset by product quality-related expenses.
Our SSG&A spending rose 9% year-over-year on an FX-neutral basis, including a 380 basis point impact from deferred compensation, which as you know is fully offset in other income expense.
The remaining increase in SSG&A is primarily related to higher shipping costs and investment spending as part of our BD Veritor profit reinvestments.
Our R&D spending ramped sequentially as planned as we reinvested some of the BD Veritor profits behind new pipeline innovations.
R&D increased 18.7% year-over-year on an FX-neutral basis to $295 million, representing 6% of our revenues.
Our operating income grew 14.3% on a year-over-year reported basis and 13% on an FX-neutral basis.
Our operating margin was 24.5%, up 20 basis points on an FX-neutral basis.
Deferred compensation was an 80 basis point headwind.
Our interest and other expenses totaled $111 million versus $170 million in the year ago period.
The reduction of interest other net on a year-over-year basis, primarily reflects a decrease in deferred compensation offsetting increases in SSG&A as previously mentioned.
It also reflects reduced interest expense due to debt repayment and refinancing activities and lower interest rates.
Our tax rate was 12% lower than expected due to discrete tax items that occurred this quarter.
Our adjusted earnings per share increased 25.1% over the prior year to $3.19 on a reported basis and were up 22.7% on an FX-neutral basis.
The average diluted share count used to calculate our earnings per share in the quarter was $293.6 million.
Now turning to slide 33, I'd like to provide an update on our capital allocation priorities, but first I want to update you on the great progress we made with our cash flows and balance sheet on a year-to-date basis.
For the first half of the year, our cash flows from operations have more than doubled growing from $1.2 billion to $2.8 billion, driven by the improvement in our net income as well as working capital.
We ended the quarter with $3.7 billion in cash and equivalents and our net leverage ratio was 2.4 times, a full turn lower than a year ago.
Going forward our capital allocation strategy will be more balanced than it had been in the past as we were paying down our debt.
Now more of our cash can be deployed to support our growth strategy, tuck-in M&A, maintaining a competitive dividend and returning capital to our shareholders through share repurchases.
As a reminder under the existing share repurchase authorization plan, we have just under 7.9 million shares or roughly $2 billion remaining.
Also note that we would expect BD's dividend to be unaffected by the diabetes spin-off and therefore would increase BD's payout ratio.
Next I want to address our fiscal 2021 guidance and provide some general commentary on our overall outlook, which you can see on slide 34.
From a reporting perspective, we will continue to report our diabetes business with our BD results until the spin-off of the diabetes business is complete.
We're very pleased with the results for the quarter how we are building momentum in our core, advancing our pipeline and achieving critical milestones.
We are also pleased with the early progress we see from BD Veritor profit reinvestments.
We believe these projects should begin to provide incremental growth beginning in late 2022.
We are reaffirming our fiscal 2021 financial guidance ranges.
We continue to expect reported revenue growth of 12% to 14% for the full year 2021.
This reflects FX-neutral revenue growth in the range of 10% to 12%.
BD Veritor revenues toward the higher end of the $1 billion to $1.5 billion range and foreign currency adding approximately 200 basis points.
We also continue to expect adjusted earnings per share in the range of $12.75 to $12.85, which represents growth of 25% to 26% year-over-year.
Now we wanted to give you some color as you consider your models for the back half of the year.
We continue to reinvest some of the Veritor profits to fund projects in line with our BD 2025 strategic pillars of growth simplify and power.
Our investments continue to put temporary pressure on both our gross and operating margins in 2021.
As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to expect our operating margins in the second half of the year to be in the low 20s, reflecting our reinvestment initiatives as well as higher raw material costs.
As a reminder, we expect the reinvestment pressures that you're seeing on our margins to lift next year.
As you've seen in the past from time to time there can be some volatility in our tax rate.
We now expect our FY 2021 tax rate to be slightly lower than FY 2020's tax rate.
This helps to offset some gross margin pressure from the lower ASPs from Veritor as pricing is now approaching compared to our flu test price a bit faster than we originally anticipated.
Regarding 2022 given the momentum we are seeing our progress with our R&D pipeline the reinvestments of our BD Veritor proceeds and our tuck-in acquisition strategy we have increased confidence in our core outlook.
In fiscal 2022, excluding COVID-19 testing and Alaris 510(k) clearance, we expect our revenues to grow solidly in the mid-single digits.
As you heard Tom mention, while we're not intending to predict the FDA's time line we recognize the desire to have some input for modeling purposes.
We believe it would be prudent to think about Alaris' 510(k) clearance sometime during the second half of our fiscal 2022.
We believe it would also be prudent to model both our revenues and our margins gradually ramping as we scale our selling and manufacturing efforts.
In conclusion, we are really pleased with our second quarter results and the momentum across our businesses.
We are excited about our plans to spin-off of the diabetes business and see this as an important opportunity to create value for our shareholders.
With that, Tom, Alberto, Simon, Dave and I are happy to take any questions you have.
Operator, please open up the line for Q&A.

user
compname reports q2 adjusted earnings per share $3.19.
q2 adjusted earnings per share $3.19.
q2 revenue $4.9 billion.
bd - qtrly bd's covid-19 testing sales were $480 million.

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