Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the conference call of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements, beliefs, or opinions regarding Takeda's future business, future position, and the results of operations, including estimates, forecasts, targets, and plans of Takeda. Any forward-looking statements in this conference call are based on the current assumptions and beliefs of Takeda in light of the information currently available to it. Such forward-looking statements do not represent any guarantee by Takeda or its management of future performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. During the presentation from the company, all the telephone lines are placed for listening-only mode, and the question-and-answer session will be held after the presentation. Now we start the conference. Mr. Okubo, please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you very much for your participating in the conference call of Takeda's second quarter financial result for fiscal 2019. Now, I would like to introduce today's presenter and the panel. Mr. Christophe Weber, President and CEO, Dr. Andrew Plump, President of R&D, Mr. Costa Sarucos, Chief Financial Officer. We would like to start with opening remarks by Christophe. Christophe, please.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Great pleasure to have this conference. You might have seen our presentation earlier, but I will still say a few words, and I think Costa will also describe the situation with more details. Overall, we are very pleased with our progress. Our integration is on track. Not finished, of course. It's in progress, but we are very pleased with the way the integration is doing. To give you a sense, 94% of our employees have been notified about their position in the new Takeda. So I think this is moving at the right speed. We have not lost any business momentum. Quite the contrary, in fact, we are starting to see some products benefiting from the combination. Products like Gatex, for example, products like Vivance are examples of that. The fact that the integration is progressing well allows us also to deliver the synergies. and you will see in our financial results that we have a very strong margin result which is also linked to this integration. We are pleased with our first semester performance. It's driven by our 14 global brands which are growing at a rate of 21% and driven by good control of OPEX and our synergies. Costa will develop that. That allows us two things. One is to deliverage, and we've been helped, of course, by the disposal. We are very pleased by our net debt to EBITDA ratio, which is at 3.9, and we are able to raise our full year profit on margin guidance in spite of NatPara, because as you know, we had to recall NatPara in the U.S. In spite of that, we are able to raise our full year profit on margin guidance. We are very pleased with this performance and this outlook. Long-term, we want and we will be a growth company. It will be supported by our global brands that you see today, but the pipeline will be very critical. And, you know, as you know, we are doing an R&D day in November. Our goal during this R&D day is to demonstrate that we have a pipeline, a very innovative pipeline, and a pipeline, you know, strong enough In order to allow us to grow in the long term. So I think that would be my introduction comments and I will let Costa develop further. Thank you.