Amgen Inc.

My name is April and I will be your conference facilitator today for Amgen's third quarter 2020 financial results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. There will be a question and answer session at the conclusion of the last speaker's prepared remarks. In order to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate, we would like to request that you limit yourself to asking one question during the Q&A session. To ask a question, press star, then a number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. I would now like to introduce Arvid Sood, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Sood, you may now begin.

Okay. Thank you, April. Good afternoon, everybody. I, together with several members of our leadership team that you will hear from today, would like to welcome you to our Q3 call. The format of our Q2 call was very well received, so we'll stick to keeping our prepared comments to a minimum and limit the overall duration of the call to one hour. The slides have been posted. Just a quick reminder that we use non-GAAP financial measures in our presentation, and some of the statements will be forward-looking statements. Our 10-K and subsequent filings identify factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. So with that, I would like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Bob Bradley. Bob?

Okay, thank you for joining today's call. I'll take a few moments to discuss our performance in the third quarter and then share some thoughts on the overall operating environment in a COVID context. We delivered another strong quarter. You can see that in our revenue growth of 12%. And in addition, Once again this quarter, our revenue growth exceeded expense growth, enabling us to report earnings per share growth well ahead of revenues. Putting the results in a broader context, our double-digit increase in revenues was driven by the continued volume-driven growth of many of our innovative products, the strong uptake of our high-quality biosimilars, and the relative stability of our base business, which is proving resilient in the face of increased competition. We expect these three factors to be key for our long-term success. Turning to COVID-19, clearly the pandemic remains an important factor affecting performance for Amgen and for our industry. You'll recall that Amgen grew revenues by 11 percent in the first quarter of the year, with the first 10 weeks of performance largely unaffected by the pandemic. In the second quarter, when conditions were at their worst, revenues grew by 6 percent. Our performance in the third quarter reflects an encouraging recovery from the depths of the pandemic and was largely consistent with what we anticipated for you in our remarks at the time of our second quarter call. As regards the fourth quarter, we see the current resurgence in cases as a potential headwind for our business, and we are closely monitoring this to see what the impact may be for the rest of the year and if there might be any spillover into 2021. We don't expect anything like what we saw earlier in the year, as global healthcare systems know much more about how to treat COVID-19 and are better prepared to do so than they were earlier in the year. However, on the margin, we're not ruling out that there will be some impact, and we've tried to incorporate this into our planning assumptions for the fourth quarter and into the beginning of next year. Overall, I remain optimistic that innovation from the biopharma industry will break the back of this pandemic with vaccines, antibodies, and other therapeutics that are being developed with unprecedented speed and collaboration. One thing this pandemic has exposed is the importance of innovation. And that, of course, is at the core of our strategy, and it's reflected in the first-in-class molecules that are advancing rapidly in our pipeline. We're pleased, of course, with the Phase II results of our first-in-class molecule, sotiracib, and we expect to see top-line Phase III data for tezupelumab, a potential first-in-class treatment for severe asthma by year-end. We're also making good progress with several of our half-life extended-bite molecules, particularly in solid tumors like prostate and small-cell lung cancer. All the work that we do is taking place at a time when more is expected of companies than ever before. We understand these expectations and are committed to good corporate citizenship and sustainable operations. Before I turn things over to the rest of the team, let me thank our staff members around the world for their unwavering commitment to serving patients during this challenging time. Their resilience, creativity, and ability to execute give me great confidence in our long-term future. Dave?