AstraZeneca PLC

Good afternoon, Europe, and good morning to the US. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to AstraZeneca's Half Year Results 2021 presentation, conference call, and webcast for investors and analysts. Before I hand over to AstraZeneca, I'd like to read the safe harbor statement. The company intends to utilize the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Participants on this call may make forward-looking statements with respect to the operations and financial performance of AstraZeneca. Although we believe our expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, by their very nature, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and may be influenced by factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made on this call reflect the knowledge and information available at the time of this call. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. Please also carefully review the forward-looking statements disclaimer in the slide deck that accompanies this presentation and webcast. There will be an opportunity to ask questions after today's presentations. If joining on the telephone, please press star 1 to indicate you wish to ask a question at any time during the call. For those on the webcast, you'll find an on-screen text box in which you can type your question. With that, I will now hand you over to AstraZeneca.

Hello, everyone. It's Pascal Soriot here, CEO of AstraZeneca. Welcome to the first half 2021 conference call and webcast for investors and analysts. As always, the presentation was posted to AstraZeneca.com earlier today, and it was also sent out by email. Please turn to slide two. This is our usual safe harbor statement. We will be making comments on our performance using constant exchange rates, or CER, core financial numbers and other non-GAAP measures, including total revenue, excluding the COVID-19 vaccine for pandemic use, as well as the impact of the pandemic vaccine on EPS. A reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP data is contained in the results announcement. Numbers used are in million US dollars and for the first half of 2021, unless we state otherwise. So if we move to slide three, we plan to review the presentation first and then do Q&A until 1.15 PM UK time. We're also looking forward to seeing many of you on the roadshow and other meeting activities next week. If you keep your questions short, we'll try to keep answers short too. For those on the phone, I'm smiling because each time I say that and we are never very successful about this, but we'll try again. For those on the phone, please join in the queue for questions by pressing star one. There's also an option to ask questions as part of the webcast, and we propose you ask only one question. Many thanks. In speaking order, I'm joined by Dave Fredrickson, who is our EVP of the Oncology Business Unit, Ruud Dobber, the EVP of the Biopharma Business Unit, Mark Dunawaye, our EVP and CFO, and the incoming CEO of Alexion. Manny Pangalos, our EVP for Biopharma R&D. Susan Galbraith, our EVP for Oncology R&D. Warm welcome to Susan. For the questions later, we also have Leon Wang, our EVP for China and the emerging market.

And also Aradhana Sarin, our incoming CFO, who joins us from Alexion. A warm welcome to Aradhana as well.