Royalty Pharma plc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Royalty Farmer First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. I would like now to turn the conference over to George Grofik, Senior Vice President, 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 2024 results. You can find the press release with our earnings results and slides to this call on the investors page of our website at royaltypharma.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 that may cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. I refer you to our 10-K on file with the SEC for a description of these risks. All forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to Royalty Pharma, and we assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Non-GAAP liquidity measures will be used to help you understand our financial performance. The reconciliation of these measures to our GAAP financials is provided in the earnings press release available on our website. And with that, please advance to slide four. Our speakers on the call today are Pablo Legareta, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Marshall Uris, EVP, Head of Research and Investment, Chris Height, EVP, Vice Chairman, and Terry Coyne, EVP, Chief Financial Officer. Pablo will discuss the key highlights, after which Marshall will give a portfolio update. Next, Chris will discuss your health and safety portfolio, after which Terry will review the financials. Following concluding remarks from Pablo, we will hold a Q&A session. 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 successful start to 2024 as we execute against our vision to be the leading partner funding innovation in the life sciences. In terms of the financials, we delivered 40% growth in royalty receipts. This represents our recurring cash flows. And the strong performance in our quarter reflects the quality of our diversified portfolio of more than 35 commercial products. Milestones and other contractual payment receipts which are more variable, declined, reflecting the high base effect of the year-ago quarter from a non-recurring BioHeaven-related payment. As a result, portfolio receipts, our top line, declined to $717 million, which was in line with our expectations. Turning to capital allocation, today we're announcing an exciting transaction, which is expected to take our capital deployment to approximately $670 million. Marshall will take you through the details, but in summary, we have agreed to acquire royalties and milestones on Sanofi's Frexalamab for approximately $525 million, including estimated transaction costs. This is an exciting development stage therapy with multi-blockbuster potential and multiple sclerosis and other immune indications. Following the 5% increase in our dividend in the first quarter, I'm also delighted to announce today a new commitment to grow our dividend by mid-single digit percentage on an annual basis. Looking at our portfolio, we will have 15 development stage therapies, which we estimate have the combined potential to generate significantly greater than $1 billion in peak royalties. Most of these therapies have blockbuster sales potential and are in development by premier global marketers. We believe our development stage portfolio is highly attractive and underappreciated by the market. And Chris will expand on the multiple potential events we expect over the next year. Lastly, I am pleased to reconfirm our 2024 full year guidance. we continue to expect portfolio receipts to be between $2.6 billion and $2.7 billion, based on expected growth in royalties receipts of around 5% to 9%. Consistent with our standard practice, our guidance is based on our current portfolio and does not include the benefit of any future transactions. Slide seven shows our impressive track record of strong growth since our IPO. As I noted earlier, We delivered 14% growth in royalty receipts in our first quarter. This is the highest growth rate we have achieved since the first quarter of 2022 and sets us up well to deliver our full-year guidance. This slide also illustrates the variable contribution from milestones and other contractual receipts when we look at the overall trend in portfolio receipts. Overall, the track record of strong growth speaks to our ability to execute successfully and consistently against our strategy in the growing market for biopharma royalties. With that, I will hand it over to Marshall to update you on our portfolio.