“Looking ahead to 2024, Johnson & Johnson's robust free cash flow generation should continue to solidify our already strong financial foundation and fuel further investment leading to growth for our business or returns to shareholders.”

In context

“an to continue to increase our dividend annually. We also deployed, announced or committed over $3 billion in strategic value creating inorganic growth opportunities in the last 12 months. This amount includes the recent Ambrx and Laminar transactions as well as more than 50 smaller early-stage licensing deals and partnerships that complement our current Innovative Medicine and MedTech pipelines. Finally, share repurchases. In early 2023, we completed the $5 billion share repurchase program initiated in late 2022 and in combination with our dividend, returned over $14 billion to shareholders last year. Through the Kenvue separation, we further reduced the Johnson & Johnson's outstanding share count by 191 million shares or approximately 7% without the use of cash and in a tax-free manner. Looking ahead to 2024, Johnson & Johnson's robust free cash flow generation should continue to solidify our already strong financial foundation and fuel further investment leading to growth for our business or returns to shareholders. Now turning to our full year 2024 guidance. Today, we are confirming the 2024 guidance for those items previewed at our enterprise business review in early December by filling in some of the details. We expect operational sales growth for the full year to be in the range of 5% to 6% or $88.2 billion to $89 billion. As a reminder, our sales guidance continues to exclude any impact from COVID-19 vaccine sales. In Innovative Medicine, we expect 2024 to deliver a 13th consecutive year of above market growth, driven by market share gains from key brands such as DARZALEX, TREMFYA and ERLEADA as well as continued adoption of recently launched newer products such as CARVYKTI, TECVAYLI, TALVEY and SPRAVATO. In MedTech, we remain focused on executing our key value drivers: first, advancing our diff”