Cardinal Health (CAH) official guidance

First, we expect capital expenditures of $700 million with infrastructure, technology, and other investments across the portfolio in support of future growth.

Consequently, we expect our diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 233 million.

We project our effective tax rate to be 19%-20% for the year.

However, for fiscal year 2027, we are guiding EPS growth of 13%-15% against the baseline and expect fiscal 2027 EPS to be between $12.40 and $12.60.

With respect to cash flow, we expect to generate between $3.5 billion and $4 billion in adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2027, driven by the growth of our businesses, maintaining a disciplined approach to working capital management, and the impact of discrete business initiatives focused on cash flow generation.

Moving below the operating line, we forecast interest and other expense to be $240 million-$290 million, benefiting from our year-end high cash balances prior to deployment.

As a matter of clarity, our guidance includes the partial year impact of the announced tuck-in acquisitions of the Diabetes Health segment of AdaptHealth and the recently completed tuck-in acquisition of Strive Medical, which are expected to add 2 percentage points of profit growth to the year to other.

As a reminder, we will lap the Solaris acquisition in Q2 of fiscal 2027 and would note that our already announced M&A is expected to contribute 2 percentage points-3 percentage points to profit growth in the year.

For the Global Medical Products and Distribution segment, we project 2%-4% growth in revenue.

In our other growth businesses, we anticipate 11%-13% growth in revenue and expect that growth to accelerate over the course of the year.

We expect Pharma segment revenue to show 3%-5% growth in the coming year.

Fourth, in specialty, inclusive of all organic and already announced inorganic efforts, double-digit revenue growth, including contributions from new customers in our Biopharma Solutions business.

Nuclear has continued to be a strong part of the portfolio, and we are expecting double-digit growth from theranostics.

We are reconfirming our previous GMPD segment profit guide of growing approximately $50 million off the ex IEEPA tariff refund fiscal 2026 result, with expected segment profit of $200 million-$220 million.

For purposes of modeling, we expect the first quarter of fiscal 2027 to be roughly half of the Q1 fiscal 2026 result, driven by the impacts of both foreign currency and the impact of distributor purchase timing.

We expect segment profit to deliver 15%-18% growth in the year.

On the profit line, we expect the Pharma segment to deliver 8%-11% growth.

In terms of Pharma segment profit cadence, we expect Q1 profit growth to be near the high end of our full-year guidance range, due in part to the benefit from Solaris before we lap it in Q2.

In fiscal year 2027, we expect at least $1 billion in share repurchases, which would be the third consecutive year of additional share repurchases above our original stated baseline commitment.

Reflecting the impact of our share repurchase activity, we are updating our outlook for weighted average shares outstanding to approximately 237 million shares from our previous guidance of 237 million-238 million shares.