Amid a challenging backdrop, Agilent's highly resilient performance throughout 2020 demonstrated the durable and high-quality nature of its business model. Despite the impact of the COVID crisis, the company generated positive revenue growth and improved profitability, with 1% organic growth and 20 basis points of operating profit margin expansion in fiscal year 2020.
The company was able to achieve these results without furloughing a single employee. The resulting organizational stability allowed the Agilent team to remain focused on customer-centric initiatives and new product innovation to drive market share gains. For example, the company launched several new instrument lines designed to improve throughput for high volume testing in the pharmaceutical end market. Likewise, in its CrossLab services segment, the company is capitalizing on the trend of labs increasingly outsourcing multiple services to a single vendor, and has recently won several large, lab-wide, enterprise service contracts.
The pandemic provided the company with a timely opportunity to accelerate its digital transformation. Agilent quickly adopted online engagement channels and digital tools to remotely respond to customer service requests and sales inquiries in a timely and reliable manner. This online service approach yielded record high customer satisfaction scores. As the business emerges from the pandemic, we expect Agilent to remain committed to its digital transformation as it not only supports a higher standard of customer engagement, but also allows for more efficient internal operations and cost savings.
In December, Agilent held an Analyst Day to highlight the acceleration in the company's long-term revenue growth outlook and margin expansion opportunity. Management significantly raised its guidance from its Analyst Day, and the company is now targeting long-term organic growth of 5% to 7%, and margin expansion of up to 100 basis points per annum. Agilent's strong business momentum was clearly reflected in its most recent quarter, where the company delivered 11% organic growth and an impressive 260 basis points of margin expansion.
We believe that Agilent will be a more profitable and competitive company post COVID-19.
From Bill Ackman (Trades, Portfolio)'s Pershing Square 2020 annual shareholder letter.
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