AstraZeneca PLC

Good morning to those joining from the UK and the US. Good afternoon to those in Central Europe and good evening to those listening in Asia. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to AstraZeneca's Half Year and Q2 Results 2023 webinar 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 webinar. There will be an opportunity to ask questions after today's presentations. Please use the raise a hand feature at any time to indicate you wish to ask a question. And please remember to unmute your line when invited to speak. And with that, I'll now hand you over to the company.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome, everybody. I'm Andy Barnett, Head of Investor Relations at AstraZeneca, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to AstraZeneca's first half and second quarter of 2023 conference call. As usual, all materials presented are on our website. This slide contains 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. A non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliation is contained within the results announcement. Numbers used are in millions of US dollars unless otherwise stated. This slide shows our agenda for today's call. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. We will try and address as many questions as we can during the allotted time, although I'd ask the participants to limit the number of questions you ask to allow others a fair chance to participate in the Q&A. As a reminder, to ask a question, please use the raise a hand function in Zoom, or alternatively, you can click the Q&A button and write your questions. With that... Pascal, I will hand the call over to you.

Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome. Please move on to the next slide. Total revenue in the first half of the year increased 4% to $22.3 billion, with 16% growth in our non-COVID medicines, offsetting a $2.2 billion decline in our COVID-19 medicines revenue. Core earnings per share increased 21% to $4.04, This increase reflects both our robust business performance as well as a gain following an update to our contractual relationships for before Tuesday in the US. We continue to benefit from our diverse commercial portfolio in our global footprint. Given our strong execution in the first half, we remain confident in our outlook for the remainder of the year and we have reiterated our 2023 guidance. Next slide, please. Taking a closer look at the performance of our non-COVID business across our regions and these areas, growth in the emerging markets continues to be strong, in particular outside of China. Emerging markets outside of China collectively grew by 38% in the first half. This growth underscores our confidence that these markets will become increasingly important to our business. We also saw double-digit growth across the EU and Europe in the period. On the right-hand side, you will see that we delivered robust double-digit growth across oncology, CVRM, RNA, and rare disease. And as expected, we saw declines in VNI. This growth reflects from medicines' performance across these areas. Please advance to the next slide. When we look at performance across our portfolio, in the first half, we had eight medicines deliver over $1 billion each in product sales. A broad range of these products are driving our growth, as you can see from this slide. For effective life cycle management, we've seen an acceleration in the rate of growth for several medicines, such as Mfinzi and Farciga, with new indications making important contributions to revenues. Ultramir is growth to that once again, and is the result of both successful conversion from Soliris, as well as growth in patient numbers. We've also seen promising global growth from some of our more recently launched medicines, including Onher2, Kalkoens, Breasttree, Tespire, and Safnello, all of which are helping to change the course of their respective diseases. Next slide, please. Confidence in our long-term outlook is supported by our robust Let's Touch pipeline, which now has well over 120 active projects. Importantly, we maintain a rigorous approach to R&D development, setting a high bar for lead-stage trial initiations, and advancing only the most promising projects. We strive to stay at the front of the innovation curve, and we have already progressed 14 new molecular entities into lead-stage development. We're making good progress towards initiating 30 new pivotal trials this year, having those nine in the year to date, with recent additions including the LITHOS trial for breast-train asthma, and two next-generation propellant trials which will support expansion of our PMDI portfolio. As we indicated last quarter, most of the new pivotal trials are expected to those in the second half of this year. Our pipeline continues to make exciting progress with eight positive pivotal oncology trials already this year. These are shown on the right-hand side of this slide. In particular, we are encouraged by the positive results from the tropion lung one, trial of DETO DXD and are excited to unlock the full potential of this promising medicine. On the next slide, Aradhana can take you through our financial highlights in the first half, as well as provide some further insights into how we are embracing the power of artificial intelligence across our manufacturing and supply chain. Over to you, Aradhana.