Merck & Co., Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Merck and Company Q4 Sales and Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's conference. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Peter Dannenbaum, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Ivy, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Merck's fourth quarter 2023 conference call. Speaking on today's call will be Rob Davis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Caroline Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer, and Dr. Dean Lee, President of Merck Research Labs. Before we get started, I'd like to point out a few items. You will see that we have items in our GAAP results, such as acquisition-related charges, restructuring costs, and certain other items. You should note that we have excluded these from our non-GAAP results and provide a reconciliation in our press release. I would like to remind you that some of the statements that we make today may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are made based on the current beliefs of Merck's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. If our underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Our SEC filings, including item 1A and the 2022 10K, identify certain risk factors and cautionary statements that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in any of our forward-looking statements made this morning. Merck undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements. During today's call, a slide presentation will accompany our speaker's prepared remarks. These slides, along with the earnings release, today's prepared remarks, and our SEC filings are all posted to the investor relations section of Merck's website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Rob.

Thanks, Peter. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. 2023 was another very strong year for Merck. I'm extremely pleased by the progress we've made to develop and deliver transformative therapies and vaccines that will help save and improve lives around the world. We reached more than 500 million people with our medicines last year alone, over half of which were through donations. We also made substantial investments in research and development in our ongoing effort to discover and bring forward to patients the next generation of impactful innovations, over $30 billion in total, including the cost of certain acquisitions and collaborations. As we move forward, I'm confident that our strong momentum will continue, underpinned by the unwavering dedication of our talented global team. We're realizing the benefits of our sustained focus on key strategic priorities. The excellence of our commercial and operational execution enables us to deliver tangible value in the short term while we invest in new innovations and strengthen our pipeline for the long term. In 2023, we advanced important clinical programs and augmented our pipeline with promising business development, such as the acquisition of Prometheus and our collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo. Guided by our science-led strategy, I'm confident that the focused and disciplined business decisions we make and the actions we take will lead to sustainable benefits for the patients we serve and long-term growth and value for our shareholders. Turning to our results and initial outlook for 2024, we delivered excellent underlying growth in 2023, reflecting robust demand for our innovative portfolio. I'm pleased to share that we expect continued strong growth in 2024 driven by demand for our key products, which Caroline will speak to momentarily. Turning to the progress we're making in research, we're currently pursuing programs across a more diverse set of therapeutic areas with high unmet need and across more modalities than in any time in recent memory. This year, we'll remain keenly focused on advancing our broad and diverse pipeline, which includes two launches that will address critical health needs and have blockbuster commercial opportunity. In cardiometabolic, we're very excited by the anticipated FDA action on our application for Sertatacept in the United States, which we believe has the potential to transform the treatment journey for many patients suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension. Our commercial and manufacturing teams are fully prepared for the strong uptake we expect. Sertatacept is an important component of our growing cardiometabolic pipeline, which we believe has significant long-term potential. In vaccines, the FDA accepted for priority review are filing for V116. If approved, V116 would be the first vaccine specifically designed to address the majority of invasive pneumococcal disease in adults ages 65 and older. Based on its compelling profile, V116 has the potential to become an important new preventative option for adults, and we believe it can achieve majority market share in this setting. We look forward to a potential approval in June. And in oncology, we continue to expand into additional tumor types and earlier stages of certain cancers, as well as progress our increasingly broad pipeline of novel candidates. We have achieved substantial diversification with a dramatically expanded set of late stage programs, which Dean will speak to. I'm confident that Merck is well positioned to provide important innovation to patients and sustain its leadership in oncology well into the future. I know Dean and his team are energized by our progress and are prepared to build on the success we've had in 2023 to further advance Merck's pipeline and bring transformative innovation to patients this year and beyond. In summary, our science-led strategy, which keeps the patient at the center of everything we do, is delivering important advancements and helping us build a sustainable growth engine for our company. We've made considerable progress over the past year in advancing and expanding our pipeline, which has resulted in substantially increased long-term commercial opportunities. We've taken meaningful steps to diversify and position ourselves for sustained leadership in oncology, while also building one of our deepest and broadest pipelines across discovery and development in our recent history outside of oncology and notably in cardiometabolic and immunology. Further, we also expect to benefit from promising late-stage programs across our vaccines, neurosciences, HIV, and animal health pipelines, a robust set of early phase programs, and the potential to add exciting innovation through future science-led business development. As a result, we are increasingly confident that we're well-positioned to drive patient impact and value creation this year and well into the next decade. I would again like to thank our global teams for their commitment to strong research, commercial, and operational execution. With a concerted focus on achieving continued excellence, I'm very confident in our ability to deliver short and long-term stakeholder value. I look forward to providing future updates on our progress and impact. With that, I'll turn the call over to Caroline.