Sandoz Group Ag S/Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Sandoz call today. I will now pass on to Karen King, Global Head of Investor Relations, for her opening remarks.

Welcome to Sandoz's half-year results 2024. Earlier today, we issued a half-year 2024 report, including the financial statements of the company for the first half of the year. We also released a press release summarizing our sales performance in the second quarter, and our results for the first half. In addition, we published a supplemental slide presentation on our website earlier this morning, which we will follow on today's call. You can find all these documents in the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.sandos.com. Joining me on today's call are Richard Sanor, our Chief Executive Officer, and Remco Steenbergen, our Chief Financial Officer. Remco joined us on July 1st and is with us today for his first Sandoz Earnings Call. Our report, press release, presentation, and discussion include forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current belief and expectations regarding future events and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. In this document, we present certain non-IFRS measures. These non-IFRS measures may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of other companies and have limitations as analytical tools, and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the analysis of our operating results as reported under IFRS. Non-IFRS measures are not measurements of our performance or liquidity under IFRS. They should not be considered as alternatives to profit for the year or any other performance measures derived in accordance with IFRS. For discussion purposes only, in today's presentation, Sales in this document refer systematically to net sales to third parties, and our comments on growth are expressed in constant currency. As a reminder, in the first half of 2023, third-party sales excluding sales to our former parent, as this was shown as a separate line item. Post-separation, sales to our former parent were classified as third-party sales. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to our CEO, Richard Steynor.

Thanks, Karen. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our second quarter and half-year 2024 results call. We had an exciting and promising half-year, and I'm looking forward to sharing our results with you today. The momentum in our business continues as we execute on our strategy. We are making considerable progress on our biosimilar launches, and at the same time, are advancing some of the key biosimilar products in our pipeline.