2/2/2023

speaker
Automated Voice
System

Recording in progress.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

and listen only mode during the call session. You are invited to send a question to this throughout the entire session using the Q&A functionality of Zoom. In addition to that, you may also raise your virtual hand to address your questions verbally. For participants joining via phone, to raise your hand, use star nine on your phone's dial pad. When you then get selected to ask your questions, please follow the instructions from the phone and press star six to unmute yourself. One last remark, if you would like to follow the presented slides on your end as well, please feel free to go to roche.com slash investors to download the presentation. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Severin Schwan, CEO Roche Group. Mr. Schwan, the stage is yours.

speaker
Severin Schwan
Chief Executive Officer, Roche Group

Thank you very much and a warm welcome from my side. Thank you for joining us for our briefing on the 2022 group results. Let's get right into the numbers. Overall, we delivered a good performance in both divisions, very much driven by the newer medicines on the one hand and the strong base business in diagnostics. This was partly offset by the starting decline of our COVID-19 related sales, amounted to roughly 1 billion Swiss francs last year. Now, as far as the pipeline is concerned, on the one hand, as you know, we did have some setbacks last year, but we also made good progress in our portfolio. We launched, in particular, are off to a very good start. We also launched Lunsumia. We'll talk about those opportunities later and there's a lot more to come for the current year. Now, just to remind us again, we did deliver on the guidance, both in terms of sales and core earnings per share. And on that basis, the board is proposing to the AGM to increase the dividend to nine Swiss francs and 50 Rappen. If we look on the divisional results, You see a 2% growth on the pharma side. So if we would correct here for the COVID cells, actually the underlying growth is 4%. And on the diagnostic side, again, if we would correct for the COVID-19 testing, then the underlying growth of the base business is 7%. So on that slide, actually, you can see the impact of COVID-19 also on a quarterly basis. And it's quite interesting to look at that. And if you focus into the kind of last four quarters on that, slide on the right hand side, you see in the first quarter last year, we still had double digit growth from COVID that came then sharply down to a flat growth in the second quarter. And you saw a declining business as expected, I should say, in the third quarter of 6%. So what you also see is in the fourth quarter, we have again a positive growth. And then it's really driven by one single order we got at the very end of the year from Japan, an order which has been placed already for some time for Ronabrief, and that brought us up to 4%. But if you look at the underlying business, we clearly see that impact of the declining COVID-19 business, and that is going to accelerate for 2023. But we'll come back to the guidance in a moment. So here again, on that slide, on the left-hand side, you see a bit more granularity in terms of what is happening with the underlying business. Dyer-based business up 900 million. So this is the 7% I referred to. And if you then include the half a million COVID-19 testing sales, which eroded last year, then you come to the overall 3%, which I showed on the initial slide. Now, on the pharma side, actually, for the purpose of this slide, we excluded two parts. On the one hand, COVID-19 related sales, which is Rona brief, and that was positive because of this Japan order. If we wouldn't have had that Japan order, actually, it would have been negative as well. And you also see this impact, the negative impact of Actemra, which is also driven by less demand for COVID-19. And then on top of it, we have continued erosion on Avastin Herceptin and Rituxim EHR of 1.9 million. So if you're correct for those two effects, then the underlying growth has been 3.4 billion Swiss francs. So you see the underlying business is growing in the high single digits, very much driven. by the newer medicines. I find the right-hand part of that slide quite interesting as well. If we look back over the last five years in 2017, we still had the full sales for EHR. You can see this was about half of our sales for the pharma division. And you can really see two things here. One is we were not only to compensate for that decline, but actually we grew the business overall from about 50 billion back then to over 60 billion today. But what you also see is how much the portfolio has diversified. We have a less prominent position in oncology, even though this remains our most important segment, but we have entered other areas, in particular neuroscience, of course, with Ocrevus, with Evristi, with EndSpring. We are the leader in Haemophilia A with HemLibra. And you see this kind of small part here, this slice in light blue, which is Vabaismo. And for sure, that part of the pie chart will enlarge over time as we see a very strong growth for Vabaismo and an area where we want to take a leading position. So again here, a slide which shows the rejuvenation of our pharma portfolio. Last year, in addition to the launch of Vabaismo, we also launched Lunsumia, the second new molecular entity, as you know, in blood cancer. And there's more to come in this field also this year. We expect hopefully three NME launches this year. Glovitamab. an aggressive lymphoma. We have the collaboration with Zarepta in Duchenne, and we actually wait for data for Crovalimab, which should come in very soon. Here again, a look at the underlying business excluding COVID related sales. And I guess the message here is we have a good uptake in the fourth quarter, actually both in pharma and in diagnostics with a 5% growth on the pharma side and 8% growth in diagnostics. So a good momentum as we ended the year. Now, stable margins in terms of co-operating results. And I'm sure Alan will later dive a bit more into the overall financial results, including the non-operating items. Good. As we announced this morning, the board is suggesting a dividend increase to 9 Swiss francs 50 Rappen. Let me conclude with the outlook for the current year. We have a number of readouts. Thomas will cover that in more detail. Let me just make a comment on tiragolumab in non-small cell lung cancer. As you know, we didn't reach a positive result for progression-free survival. And as you also know, we are waiting for the overall survival results this year. So just let me again talk about the timelines during this year. First of all, I should say we have no data in-house. We have no additional information. We have no data in-house. And we expect an interim readout still in February. But from all what we know today, the most likely scenario is that the study will continue until the final readout in the second half of this year. So we think this is about six months later. It's an event driven study, but it will only read out in the second half of the year. And again, this is by far the most likely scenario. There is, of course, as always with an interim study, a possibility that we either get a positive or a negative result. If that should be the case, then we would immediately communicate that result to the outside because that would clearly be material. If, however, the study just continues until the final readout, then we are not going to make a specific announcement. In other words, if you don't hear back in February, then you know that the study will continue until the final readout in the second half of this year. Good. Just a word on the sales outlook. We've guided, as you have seen, for low single-digit decline, and it's really entirely driven by the expected decline in our COVID-related sales of roughly 5 billion Swiss francs. That is about 8% of our overall business, and we will largely compensate for that. We've also given you a guidance here of what we expect on the EHR front. We expect a further erosion, but of course, in the meantime, this is on a much lower level at 1.6 billion. But what that means is for the underlying business, as an implied conclusion that there is a strong growth on the pharma side, of course, and a strong momentum from our ongoing launches and existing portfolio. And we also expect that our base business in diagnostics is going to keep a strong momentum. So overall, low single digit decline on the sales side, core EPS to develop in line with sales. And on that basis, we should again be able to further increase the dividend in Swiss francs. Thank you very much. And with this, I hand over to Thomas. I guess the last time that you present a farmer before you take over from me in March. Over to you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-

Investor presentation