Aspen Pharmacare Holdings Limited

Good morning. A very warm welcome to everyone joining us in person online for Aspen's 2025 interim results presentation. To kick things off, we'll hear from Stephen, our group CEO, who will take us and give us an overview of our performance. Following that, we'll have Sean, our group CFO, who will run us through the financial review. Stephen will then return to discuss our strategy, prospects, and guidance. And then finally, we'll open up the floor for questions and answers. For those joining us on the webcast, please feel free to type in your questions, and I'll be happy to read them out. We'll also be taking questions for those present in the room. With that, I'll now hand over to Stephen. Stephen, over to you.

Good morning everyone and thank you for those that are here live and those that are online, welcome too. Interesting time and juncture that we've reached as Aspen. I'm trying to think, it might have been two or three presentations ago we gave you a presentation with green lines and red lines and the red with the headwinds and the green is where we hope to get to this point and financial year 25 was an important year for us. All the red lines came true. All the headwinds were there, and as is life, they all came true. But I'm also happy to tell you that our green lines, they also have come true. So where we stand today strategically, we have a commercial farmer business that has been de-risked, de-risked from a – let me see if we can get this thing going here, sorry – I'm trying to keep to the script, but I'm not very good at that, but de-risked from a perspective of we've dealt with China VBP, we've dealt with the issues within Russia, and so you're starting to see that base growth that we were talking about historically and without China in. And then we also said... So commercial farmers are about de-risking and getting organic-based rice. In manufacturing, we had a couple of key objectives here. One was to resolve heparin, and two was to start building on finished-dose form sterile contracts. I think we've achieved all of that. The heparin business, as you know, about this time last year, we managed to turn it into a toll model, so we weren't exposed to commodity risks. And the sterile contracts, as you can see, are building year on year. If I stand here today and tell you what are we really focused on, I think our key objectives going forward are already twofold. One, to keep building on the sterile contracts, particularly our South African contracts. We really need to deliver on those. And it's getting really close now. And, of course, the opportunities around the GLP-1 space, both commercially and manufacturing-wise. If we go straight down to the delivery in these six months, and I think you can see execution advancements across both what we expect to do in the six months and the opportunities we've created for the future. We had earlier delivery than planned on some of our, particularly our manufacturing contracts that were expected in H2. They've come into H1. And we've had very good operational delivery, double-digit growth in revenue in commercial farming, both revenue and EBITDA. And I'm talking at constant exchange level. We've had normalised EBITDA in manufacture more than double. And that's interesting because you'll see no growth in turnover. because the heparins are, but you see a doubling of the EBITDA. Of course, that's good for margins. And you see higher gross profits and normalized EBITDA percentages. We've spoken a bit about the commercial farmer business. We don't, you know, for at least three years, I kept saying, when this happens in China, if this happens in Russia, when this happens in China, at least we've stopped with the F then, and we can just deal with a base business that we're all more accustomed to in Aspen, which is really a post-patent base without... massive fall-offs or drops in a relatively steady growth path. When we look at our manufacturing finished dose form, which is some of our key areas now around manufacturing and the GLPs, you'll see the growth. We're realizing increased contract manufacturing, and the insulin transfer is progressing in South Africa. Important for us to pass the validation stages, and hopefully we anticipate some of this coming into financial year 2025. GLP-1 is a particularly exciting opportunity for us, and we see it as a very material opportunity for both commercial and manufacturing, and I'll talk to you later about how this is progressing. We're a lot further now than we were six months ago. Going forward, we expect to see double-digit CR growth in EBITDA, and operating cash flows is really a key focus for us as well, and for those of you that know us, we always have this weighting to the first half in terms of building stocks for a bigger second half, particularly in manufacturing, and we expect that again in this period, and operating cash flow conversion rates of forecast to exceed 100%. So with that, Sean, maybe you can take everyone through the numbers here, so thank you.

Thank you, Stephen. As you can see, it's been a very busy first half in moving forward operationally and in executing on our strategic ambitions. So we are very pleased to talk to you about the first half results. And as we say in sport, the half-time score is good, but we've got to get to full-time. So that's where our focus is going to be. And Stephen will talk you through that after my section. So coming into just a brief overview of the highlights from a revenue perspective. We grew revenue in constant currency at 9% and 4% in reported. You'll note I'll keep talking between reported and constant because there was quite a big impact of currency, and I've got a separate slide I'll talk you through a bit later, but a good increase in our revenue, 9%, and we'll take you through the detail of the components there. If you look then forward to normalised EBITDA, from a CEO perspective, up 21%, 12% in reported, and that is significantly ahead of your revenue growth, and importantly, your gross margin growth is also above 20%, so 20% in gross margin and 21% in EBITDA. Moving forward to normalised headline earnings per share, a healthy growth of 17%. You will notice that that's lower than the growth in EBITDA, and the two big factors there have been the increase in our finance costs, which we did guide. We did guide that our interest rates would be higher in this first half, and also we've had an increase in our effective tax rates, and I'll take you through some of that detail in later slides. But overall, ending the half at $0.724 and a 17% growth for the half. So I think the big topic, and I think it's going to be a continual topic, is the currency impact. Quite a busy slide, so I'm going to ask you if you could direct your eyes to the bottom left graph first. And what we've done there is we've baselined the South African Rand as a June 23. and then compared all of our major trading currencies compared to that. So the ZAR is the dotted line, the blue dotted line, and all the trading currencies are the solid lines around that. So when looking to the graph on the left, you'll see this is for our FY24 12-month period. You'll see a very relatively stable position relative to all of our currencies, with the ZAR starting to strengthen, you can see, from about April, May and June. But if you look at our average exchange rates, half one to half two last year, they were very, very similar, almost identical. Someone could almost say we put numbers there, we made sure they looked the same, but they were actually the same. So from an average rate perspective, last year's first half and second half were almost identical in rate. If you then look to the graph on the right, that's our next six months, and that's effectively a continuum of the graph on the left. So again, we've rebased the RAND back to June 23. And you can see without fail, every single currency is below the blue dotted line. With particular emphasis, you can see the red line at the bottom is the Brazilian real, and the one above that, the blue line, is the Mexican peso. So a lot of weakness in those currencies relative to the RAND in this half. Those who are very astute and have good eyes will notice that we don't have the ruble in our top currencies anymore, and it's been replaced by the Colombian peso, obviously following our Viotra steel, and the fact that Russia's CIS has now become a fairly immaterial region in our overall sales. So if you look at the table in the top left, I've circled the reported numbers in red. and the CER numbers in green. You can see quite a big delta there, revenue of 5%. And as you go down the income statement, if you look at EBITDA as a 9% delta between reported and constant exchange rate, and it normalises earnings up to a 12% delta. Now, I know it's always easy to talk percentages, so I always like to give you an EBITDA perspective. So you'll notice in our financials we do present our numbers in constant exchange rate. And EBITDA last year for the full year was just under 11.3 billion. If you look at our constant exchange rate and restate that EBITDA at today's rates, it's 10.4. So nearly a billion rand, 900 million rand impact when you restate those numbers at a constant rate. So that's just to give you a bit of a value perspective that you can put to those percentages. Then moving on to our group revenue. As you saw in the first slide, group revenue has grown in constant exchange rate by 9%. You will recall, and I think Stephen briefly mentioned it in the first slide last year, we had the one-off benefit of the Heparin sales in our financial year, around about a billion rand in the first half, and that was converting the model to a toll manufacturing model, so it was a one-off sale with very little margin benefit. So if we sort of park that and put that to one side and say, let's forget about heparin because that is a distortive impact. If you look at the underlying growth of the group, the growth is actually at 15% relative to the nine. And if you look at manufacturing, you'll see that's at 0%. If you unpack or you exclude the heparin, the underlying growth in manufacturing is 20%. So overall growth, underlying growth in both segments, very, very strong and double-digit. On the commercial side, we've grown double-digit there at 13%. You'll see across all the segments, prescription, the injectables, and the OTC, all growing in constant exchange rate. You will note that OTC is the lowest growth there, but that is just really phasing, and we expect a strong recovery in the second half. And we've got detail on all of the segments in the appendix if you want to go through the detail of each of the underlying segments in commercial pharma OTC. Manufacturing, as I said, at the overall level at zero, but taking out heparin, you've grown at 20%. And if you look at the FDF growth, which is the key performer in the South, that's grown at 65% over the first half last year, and obviously a strong contributor to gross margin. Looking at our commercial pharma from a regional perspective, We've had solid growth across all the regions, aside from Australia. If you remember, Australia, we've been on a conscious strategy to increase our OTC as a segment relative to the prescription segment. Bear in mind, if you remember, the prescription has always got the challenge of regulatory price cuts in that market. And I'm pleased to say that the OTC segment now is at the same size as the RX segment in Australia. So well poised for future growth and effectively going forward we're de-risking that Australia business. You'll start seeing that OTC starting to drive overall growth in that Australian region. Apart from Australia, strong growth in all the other regions contributing to our 13% constant exchange rate growth. Obviously a big growth driver there is the acquisition we did with Viatris in LATAM. And so what we did is we excluded that. What would be our underlying growth if we excluded that acquisition? And the underlying growth is still a very strong 8% excluding the acquisition in LATAM. If you look at the key region there, Africa, Middle East, a strong growth of 13%, and obviously the Lilly portfolio, including the exciting launch of Munjara in December, have driven that trajectory. And Asia and Europe have been impacted by the product swap transaction with Sandoz, and overall providing a net benefit, a positive benefit and a positive growth to the group. Interestingly, if you look at Europe and you take out the impact of that product swap, Europe's underlying growth is actually 10%. So very healthy growth across all the regions. Moving on to gross profit margins, if you look at the graph on the left, that's our commercial farmer margins. And you'll see we've got the three halves there, half 1.24, half 2.24, and half 1.25. A very steady 59% gross margin, so we're very comfortable that the margins in commercial pharma are steady and sustainable. Again, in the appendix, we've included the three segments, so you can go look at the underlying margins, and looking at those, you'll see also a very steady trend across the three sub-segments in commercial pharma. Manufacturing, the middle graph, you'll see a nice stepped improvement there. 5% in H1 last year, 12% in H2 and up to just under 16% in this half. So really good performance with FDF being the key contributor to that gross profit growth. When you put those two together and you look at overall group margins, we've ended the half at just under 48% with an increased mix in our commercial farmer business and the improved manufacturing gross margins driving that growth in the gross margins. And we do anticipate that that margin will be sustainable into the second half. Onto our normalised EBITDA, that's up 12% in reported and 21% in constant exchange rate. If we look at revenue and gross margin, And you look at the far right, you'll see revenue in constant exchange rate, as you remember, has grown at 9%. Gross profit has well exceeded that at 20%. And if you remember, if we stripped out heparin from our sales, our sales growth, underlying sales growth, is actually 15%. So 15%, let's call it apples with apples sales growth, and a 20% gross margin. So gross margin is still exceeding sales growth, even taking up the heparin impact. So that has driven a very strong performance in terms of the gross profit margins. and is a key driver of EBITDA growth. From an expense perspective, our expense ratio is a little bit elevated this half, impacted again by that Heparin reduction in revenue, and also by the fact that we've had to absorb the Sandos China expenses in this first half, and we are going into a reshape of China in the second half, and we should see the benefits of that integration coming through in this half too, and then obviously, more importantly, going with a very clean expense base into FY26 in our China business and with improved margins. From an overall EBITDA perspective, you'll note that the EBITDA margin has gone up just under 2%, from 24.6% to 26.5%, and that is driven predominantly by the improved gross margin, both from commercial pharma and manufacturing. In our other line, we have the absence of the one-off contribution or compensation in the prior half, which you haven't enjoyed this half, so that has slightly diluted the EBITDA growth. I think importantly to also note is that we have enhanced our segmental disclosure and I think I did see some of the cell site analysts comment on that in their commentary. So we've now been able to disclose our commercial farmer segment and our manufacturing segment right down to EBITDA level. So it makes it a lot easier for you to see the relative EBITDA contributions from each of those business segments. And you'll notice that manufacturing is also north of 20% in terms of EBITDA margin. So although it's got a gross margin of 16, looking at EBITDA, it's up at 20, I think it's 21.4% to be exact. From a finance cost perspective, we've ended the half with an effective interest rate of around 5%. We were of the view that that is now peaked, and we do anticipate interest rates coming down in the second half if we start to benefit from all of these rate cuts. And so we anticipate for the full year to be less than 30 basis points higher than the FY24 interest rate. And you'll notice as well the interest rate in this half is very similar to half to last year's interest rate of 5.1%, so really peaked. Just to bear in mind, I always have that pressure of when we're paying down the loan at the IFC, which was at a 0% base rate, and as we pay that down, I think it's about €120 million a year that we pay down, that gets replaced by interest-bearing debt. So we always have that in our base, but notwithstanding that, we do see a lowering of effective interest rates going forward. And on the foreign exchange losses side, fairly muted for this half relative to the prior half. On working capital, I think Stephen's also covered that up front, but we have had an elevated working capital in this first half. It's a seasonal elevation, and we do expect that to reduce in the second half. If you look at the graph on the right-hand side, that depicts our working capital as a percentage of revenue. And on the far right, you'll see we've ended the half with working capital being 50% of revenue. That is up 5% from financial year 2014. Closing position and about 1% up from the previous half one in FY24. The seasonal increase in manufacturing inventory levels is expected to reduce. We've obviously built up that stock in the first half to support our seasonal weighting of sales in half two. And we do anticipate and we're targeting to end the year at a 45% working capital to revenue ratio and ending in line with FY24. The other impact you'll notice in the appendix, we've also had a one-off impact from our working capital with taking on the Sandosh China business. We inherited a negative working capital balance. At the start, we did have cash from Sandos to cover that, but from a working capital and accounting perspective, we now had to unwind that working capital back to a normal level, and that was around just under half a billion outflow, which is also one-off in nature and has impacted our first-half working capital. If you look to the graph on the left-hand side, that light blue line, you'll see that's the half, each of the halves operating cash flow. You'll see in this half we ended at 63% on the far right relative to last year at 89%, and that's the impact of the inventory build. This half also last year, if you remember, we did benefit from the Heparin liquidation, which also supported the 89%. last year. But if you look at the second half, it's always over 100% and we're confident that trend will continue and we continue to target to achieve more than 100% cash operating ratio for the full year. Onto tax. Unfortunately, tax always falls right through to earnings, so we've had quite a big jump in our tax rate this half. We've ended the half on our normalised with the light blue line at 21.6. That's nearly four percentage points up. On the full year, 24%, and just under 95% up on the half year last year, as the tax rates were around 17% for the half last year. So quite a big jump in the normalised tax rate, and that also falls through to the overall group tax rates, which have gone from 23% up to 25%. The big impacts there, we have had an increase in our FDF sterile mix, which is in higher tax jurisdictions, and that's something we did guide everybody to in our FY24 results that tax rates would go up in this financial year. The other big driver is, and you'll hear this term a lot, BEPS, Base Erosion Profit Shifting, BEPS Pillar 2. legislation which was promulgated I think on the 3rd of January and just to spice it up they made it retrospective to January 2024. So we had no room to move. I think in our last guidance we thought this would only impact us in FY26 but unfortunately they made it retrospective and it's now impacting us in this financial year as well. That is a global minimum tax that has to be paid across the globe. It's not just a South African legislation, but SARS have gone for early implementation, and so we've had to account for that. I think important to note from a cash flow perspective, however, because this is very complex legislation, the first return is only due in December 26, so you can only see cash outflow from BEPS pillar 2, probably from early calendar year 27 when those returns have to be submitted. But from an accounting perspective, we've made provision for these taxes now. Last but not least, very importantly on our sustainability area, which is part of Aspen's DNA and a key part of our value proposition, you will remember that we published 16 sustainability goals in our 2024 integrated report. And those are all very important goals under the pillars of patience, people, society, and environment. And we've actually given them quite nice friendly names underneath. So for patience, we're talking about healthier populations. People, we're talking about inspiring our culture. Society, creating thriving communities. And on the environment, restoring the planet. So that gives it a little bit more of a human flavor rather than just the normal word that's being used at the top level. Out of those 16, we thought, look, we're going to drive all 16, very important, but we wanted to give focus to four goals and set ourselves KPIs to achieve those goals. So we selected four specific goals out of the 16 to focus on. So the first one being on healthier populations, and this is really the main mission of Aspen is to increase access of our medicines to patients. So our goal there is by 2030 to increase the number of patients reached for critical medicines, particularly in emerging markets over a baseline of FY24, and we'll obviously continue to measure and report on that metric going forward. So that's a key underpin for us, and access is part of our DNA, as I said before. On the culture side, we want to achieve diversity and inclusivity in our workforce. And so by 2030, we want to achieve gender balance in top management positions globally. We have gender balance at the overall workforce position, but not at top management. And just to give perspective, currently we're only sitting at 31%, so we've got to go from 31% to 50% by 2030. From a society perspective, we want to continue to maintain our high governance and ethical standards. And so each year we set ourselves goals in terms of our ethics and compliance programs and KPI there is to achieve 100% of those very tight goals and make sure that we have high ethics, high compliance and always staying on the right side of the regulators in the various markets. From an environmental and restoring planet perspective, in terms of reducing carbon emissions, We plan to reduce scope one and two, which is your direct carbon emissions, by 50% by 2030, and we're measuring ourselves against the baseline of 2020. At this stage, I think we're around a 30% carbon emission reduction. So it's some way to go, but we're comfortable with all of our initiatives that are underway that we're moving well in this target. You'll notice I haven't put up the usual slide about all our waste management conversion of waste to energy project. Those are all progressing very well and we'll keep you updated on progress on all of those in our various facilities. But not to detract, we're still focusing on all 16 goals, but these are the four that move the needle and in Aspen we like to choose things that move the needle and make a big difference to the company and to society and to our planet. So on that note, I'd like to hand you back to Stephen. He's going to take you through the strategic overview and then more importantly also the prospects and guidance for the years ahead. So thank you, Stephen. Over to you.