Dear shareholders :
In the long and successful history of BD, fiscal 1999 was a difficult year. While longer-term trends and future prospects remain overwhelmingly positive, financial results for the past year did not live up to expectations.

	Clateo Castellini Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

As we announced toward the latter part of the fiscal year, we encountered slower than anticipated revenue growth, which reduced our profit expectations. For the fiscal year, BD produced revenues of $3.4 billion, a 10 percent increase over the previous year. Net income increased 17 percent to $275.7 million, while diluted earnings per share were $1.04, a 16 percent increase.

Reflecting on the challenges of the past year, I am confident that our overall direction is correct and that the disappointments we experienced can be attributed to expectations not being realized as quickly as we would have liked. The exception was home health care products. We responded to this appropriately, consolidating our resources to support those lines where we are strong while exiting those products that did not fit our strategic direction.

As you know, in recent years we have moved with a sense of urgency to transform BD as an enterprise and accelerate our revenues and earnings growth to a higher plane. In that process, we unleashed innovation and encouraged initiatives across a broad front, and we may have created more opportunities than we could effectively support.

That having been said, I would observe that the hallmarks of a transformed enterprise are the dual abilities to recognize a problem and act quickly to rectify it. The outcome for BD is very healthy: