GSK plc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the analyst call on the GSK first quarter 2021 results. I will now hand you over to Ian McKay, CFO, who will introduce today's session. Thank you.

Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2021 results, which were issued earlier today. You should have received our press release and can view presentation on GSK's website. For those not able to view the webcast, slides that accompany today's call are located on the investor section of the GSK website. Before we begin, please refer to slide two of our presentation for our cautionary statement. Speakers today are Emma Walmsley, Luke Miles, David Redfern, Brian McNamara, and myself, Ian McKay. Joining us for the Q&A portion of the call will be Dr. Hal Barron and Roger Connor. We request that you ask a maximum of two questions, but everyone has a chance to participate. Our presentation will last for approximately 30 minutes in order to maximize the opportunity for questions. With that, I'll hand the call over to Emma.

Thanks, Ian, and a very warm welcome to you all. We continue to deliver on our strategic priorities and remain very focused on creating significant value for shareholders with the launch of two new global companies next year. Both companies have the opportunity to improve the health of billions of people, and we're confident that both will offer strong performance in 2022 and beyond. For 2021, our focus is on execution and delivering this very significant change for GSK. I'm pleased to report that we're on track both on plans to separate and to deliver financial guidance for the year. Turning to the quarter, our financial results were impacted by comparisons related to stocking in Q1 2020 and disruption from the pandemic. First quarter sales and adjusted EPS were down 15 and 33% respectively at CER. We expected a challenging start to the year, but with these pandemic impacts starting to reverse in the current quarter, we're confident we'll deliver a very different performance in the second half of the year, and Ian is going to go through this shortly. Turning to our strategic priorities, we continue to see progress on each of innovation, performance, and trust. In innovation, we've strengthened our growth outlook on several fronts. Firstly, we're reshaping the landscape of HIV treatment with the launch of Cabanuvra, the world's first and only long-term treatment. We achieved important regulatory milestones with the approvals of Rokobia and Dostalimab, which are named after Jim Purley, and a positive CHMP opinion on Ben Lister. And we started phase three programs for two major pipeline assets, our RSV vaccine for older adults and 294, our long-acting IL-5 antibody, which builds on our new carless success. We also made progress in our COVID contributions, including reporting strong data for antibody VIA7831. Of course, it's never all progress in drug development, and the news received this quarter for the ICOS agonist was disappointing. But it should be seen in the context of GSK developing more than 10 novel oncology pipeline assets, as well as the broader pipeline progression, a significant shift from where we were just a few years ago. In performance, the underlying momentum of our growth drivers is strong, albeit overshadowed short-term by the COVID-driven impacts on the wider portfolio. This reflects transformed commercial capabilities, as you're going to hear shortly from Luke, David, and Brian. Shingrix is an outstanding product and continues to have a very large opportunity ahead of it. This quarter, prescription trends were heavily impacted by the rollout of government COVID vaccination programs. Looking ahead, we continue to expect and will be driving a recovery for Shingrix and our wider vaccine business in the second half of the year, given the encouraging pace of deployment of COVID vaccines in the US. Alongside commercial delivery, we've made excellent progress on our future REDI program. The commercial integration of consumer health is now broadly complete. We've generated more than a billion in net proceeds through tail brand divestment, and separation activities are advancing well. We also continue to streamline our pharma portfolio, and this quarter we announced an agreement to divest our capitalists for in business. And lastly, on trust, our focus remains on maintaining leadership across all areas of ESG, and this is evident again this quarter with actions taken on environment, global health, and diversity representation. We look forward to driving momentum on all three core priorities and to delivering a significant improvement in financial performance as the year progresses. Before I hand on to Luke, I want to highlight what we will share with you at our investor update on June 23rd. We'll provide you with a clear view of the strategy for new GST, its outlook for growth, and the opportunities we see for shareholder value creation. As part of our strategy, we'll give clarity on our target therapeutic areas for investment. We'll give revenue outlooks for the next 10 years with greater outlook detail for the first five years. We'll set out how we expect to deliver competitive performance. This will include deep dives into new growth drivers, including key R&D pipeline assets, as well as deeper visibility of new GSK's key capabilities of technology platforms. We'll also outline our capital allocation priorities and provide you with details on our expected dividend policy. And lastly, we'll set out in more detail the timing and approach of separation. We're very aware that GSK shares have underperformed and we'll demonstrate how we're building shareholder value in new GSK. With the foundation of deep change and progress made in the last few years, we believe we've developed a compelling vision and outlook to share with you. And we hope as many of you as possible will join us on the day. With that, I'll hand on to Luke.