AstraZeneca PLC

Good morning to those joining from the US, good afternoon to those in the UK and Central Europe, and good evening to those listening in Asia. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to AstraZeneca's 9 Months and Q3 Results 2024 webinar for investors and analysts. Before I head over to AstraZeneca, I'd like to read the Safe Harbor Statement. The company intends to utilize the Safe Harbor Revisions 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. There will be an opportunity to ask questions after today's presentation. Please use the raise a hand feature to indicate you wish to ask a question at any time and remember to unmute your line when invited to speak. You can also submit a written question using the Q&A tab on your screen. And with that, I will now hand you over to the company.

A warm welcome to AstraZeneca's year-to-date and third quarter 2024 presentation, conference call, and webcast for investors and analysts. I'm Andy Barnett, head of investor relations. And before I hand over to Pascal and other members of the executive team, I would like to cover some important housekeeping points. Firstly, all of the materials presented today are available on our AstraZeneca investor relations website. Next slide, please. This slide contains our safe harbor statement, which I'd encourage you to take time to read. We'll 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. All numbers quoted are in millions of US dollars unless otherwise stated. Next slide, please. This slide shows our agenda for today's call. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the line for questions. As usual, we will try to address as many of the questions you have during the allocated time, although please limit the number of questions you ask to allow others a fair chance to participate in the Q&A. And with that, Pascal, I'll hand over to you. Next slide, please.

Thank you, Andy, and welcome, everyone. In the third quarter, total revenue grew by 21%, driven by strong underlying global demand for our medicines. Core EPS increased 27% to $2.08, reflecting our continued focus on profitability. If you want to move to the next slide, please. In the year-to-date, total revenue grew 19% and core EPS grew 11%. As a reminder, total revenue and core EPS in the first nine months of 2023 benefited from one-time collaboration revenue and other cooperating income totaling $1.1 billion, which makes the 2024 year-to-date growth rate even more impressive. Importantly, this performance is across all of our focused CRP areas, with each delivering double-digit growth in both the third quarter and in the year to date. Given the strengths of our underlying business, I'm pleased to announce we have upgraded our full year guidance, and we now expect both total revenue and core EPS to increase by high teens percentages. Aradna will provide you with additional detail. Please move to the next slide. Taking a closer look at our total revenue performance in the first nine months of the year, we continue to benefit from our broad global presence. Our company is growing across all regions and we continue to strengthen our capabilities in many markets around the world, most notably in the emerging markets outside of China, where for another quarter of our performance is standing out from our peers with 30% growth in the year to date. And you can see now the very good distribution of our revenue across the world, 43% in the U.S., 21% in Europe, 13% in China. It's very pleasing to see the emerging markets outside of China are now bigger than China with 14% of our revenue and 9% for the established rest of the world. So very strong distribution. But we want to see even more growth in the U.S. over the next few years as part of our 2030 ambition. And this is why we decided today here in New York to announce this $3.5 billion investment in the U.S. in manufacturing and R&D. U.S. is, of course, a very important market that supports innovation, and we will continue to invest to grow fast in this part of the world. but very, very good growth across the world in the emerging markets in China, but also very much outside of China. With this chart, I'd like to take a moment to address recent developments in China, which, of course, have been the subject of a lot of speculation. We are actually not privy to the details of any of these investigations. If requested, we'll cooperate fully as we have in the past. As you can imagine, I personally take these matters very seriously, and the whole company also takes it, of course, very, very seriously. It's important to realize we don't have many details. We haven't been approached as a company. We will, of course, collaborate with the authorities if requested to do this, but we have very limited information, and today, We would like to focus on Q3 to the extent possible, unless there are questions relating to China that haven't been answered before by Hannah last week when she organized the call. Importantly, we remain committed to our presence in China, and we will continue to invest in the country to support the discovery and the delivery of our life-changing medicines. And finally, we're doing what we can to support our employees in China. hard at work. They're all very focused and continuing to develop our pipeline, but also our portfolio of marketed products. I just want to take a moment to thank all these employees for their continued dedication to our purpose. We have 17,000 employees in China and all these employees are working very hard and making us all you know, happy with how they have developed our presence in China over the last few years. Please advance to the next slide. Already this year we delivered multiple high value phase three readouts. Laura expands the reach of Tagrisso in early stage lung cancer. Calquence advances into mantle cell lymphoma with ECHO and with Amplify now has the potential to be the only medicine in frontline CLL approved for both fixed and extended durations of treatment. Destiny Breast 06 broke new ground for HER2, moving it one line earlier into chemo-naive metastatic breast cancer, and it showed clear benefit in HER2 ultralow disease. And IMFINZI is set to begin a new wave of growth in small cell lung cancer and bladder cancer following positive redarts for Adriatic and Niagara. Finally, as shared earlier today, COMET has potential to extend costelugo use beyond pediatric NF1PN patients to adults, and Waypoint has the potential to bring a first-in-class mechanism of action to patients with severe nasal polyps. If approved, these opportunities represent over $5 billion in combined PQR revenues on a non-risk adjusted basis. With that, please advance to the next slide, and I will now hand over to Aradna, who will take you through our financials.