Summary of Walgreen Company's 1Q14 Earnings Call

Walgreen Co.WAG

held its first quarter 2014 earnings call on Friday. First Quarter Results:

Walgreen's quarterly profit surged to $695 million, or $0.72 per share, versus a year-ago profit of $413 million or $0.43 per share.
The company reported Q1 EPS of $0.72 vs $0.73 Est.
Revenue was $18.33 billion versus the estimated $18.33 billion.
Adjusted earnings came in at $0.72 per share.
Net sales climbed to $18.33 billion from $17.32 billion.
Q1 EPS came in at $0.72 versus the estimated $0.73, missing by $0.01. EPS were Up 24% from the same quarter last year.
Sales were Up 6% year over year.

Summary of Earnings Call:

Walgreen's filled a record 213 million prescriptions in the quarter and increased pharmacy market share 50 basis points to 19.4% year over year.
The company opened an innovative new store with Johns Hopkins Medicine, which President and CEO Gregory Wasson commented, “will allow us to co-develop clinical initiatives designed to improve community health care that we intend to pull throughout the chain.”
Wasson noted, “we are generally satisfied with our top-line results, our cost management and our synergy performance this quarter. Our margins, however, were most significantly affected by the year-over-year negative impact related to generics.”
Walgreens and Theranos rolled-out groundbreaking new lab services with the opening of Theranos Wellness Centers in two stores in Phoenix.
The company administered 1.1 million more flu shots than we did last year, bringing the total for the season to-date, to 6.4 million.
Script comp was up 5.5% in the quarter and retail pharmacy market share increased 50 basis points to 19.4% year-over-year. Walgreen's exceeded the industry prescription growth rate in the quarter by 2.9 percentage points and filled a record 213 million prescriptions.
Comp prescription sales increased 7.2%. Comp front-end sales increased 2.4% and total comp store sales increased 5.4%. Comp prescriptions filled increased 5.5% versus the script comp of negative 4.8% last year.