Royalty Pharma plc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Royalty Farmer First Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the call over to George Grofik, SVP, Head of Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call. Thank you for joining us to review Royalty Farmer's First Quarter results. You can find the slides to this call on the investors' page of our website at royaltyfarmer.com. Moving to slide three, I would like to remind you that information presented in this call contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks. Uncertainties and other factors may cause actual results to differ materially. I refer you to our 10-K on file with the SEC for a description of these risks. With that, please advance to slide four. Our speakers on the call today are Pablo Legareta, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Marshall Urist, EVP, Co-Head of Research and Investments, Jim Reddick, EVP, Co-Head of Research and Investments and Chief Scientific Officer, and Terry Coyne, EVP, Chief Financial Officer. Pablo will discuss the key highlights, after which Marshall and Jim will provide an update on our royalty acquisitions and portfolio. Terry will then review the financials, and after concluding remarks from Pablo, we will hold a Q&A session. Chris Height, our Vice Chairman, will also join the Q&A session. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Pablo.

Thank you, George. and welcome to everyone on the call. I am delighted to report a great start to the year for Royalty Pharma, building off our strong momentum in 2020. Our financial performance in the first quarter was excellent, with strong double-digit top-line and bottom-line growth. In addition, we continued to execute well against our strategy. We announced up to $787 million in new royalty transactions as well as an exciting new thematic index collaboration with MSCI. And looking ahead, our pipeline continues to be very active as the demand for royalty funding of life sciences innovation is exceptionally strong. Lastly, we're also raising our guidance for adjusted cash receipts for 2021. On slide seven, you can see our financials in a little more detail. In the first quarter, we delivered 37% growth in both adjusted cash receipts and adjusted cash flow, what we consider to be our top and bottom lines, respectively. This excellent momentum positions us well to deliver another year of strong performance, as Terry will speak to when he discusses our race guidance for this year. So overall, I'm extremely pleased with our start to 2021, and for reasons we will highlight during this presentation, We continue to believe our prospects look very promising. Before I hand it over to Marshall and Jim to update you on our royalty portfolio, I would like to elaborate a bit more on a recently announced collaboration with MSCI to develop and market thematic indexes in life sciences, biotechnology, and the pharmaceutical spaces. Thematic investing is a fast-growing category of assets under management globally. and we believe we can leverage our unique skill set based around our deep scientific and clinical knowledge and our data analytics capabilities to develop novel indexes in partnership with MSCI, an innovative index provider. We see this collaboration as having a number of benefits to Royalty Pharma. First, it is expected to create a recurring and growing license revenue stream on global life sciences under management linked to these indexes. Second, we believe it expands our commitment and recognition as a leading funder of innovation in the biopharmaceutical industry. And third, we expect that upfront costs required will be minimal as we already have the capabilities in place to contribute to this important new collaboration. In terms of the financial contribution, we expect this collaboration to start small and play out over a longer period of time. That said, thematic index investing is a rapidly growing area with more than $400 billion of assets under management, of which approximately $100 billion are invested in ETFs and $300 billion in mutual funds. With healthcare representing an important segment of the economy contributing to around 18% to US GDP. We think this collaboration could be an attractive source of recurring cash flow over time. With that, I will hand it over to you, Marshall.