AZNCF - AstraZeneca PLC (AZN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-02-08 15:10:05 ET

AstraZeneca PLC (AZN)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

February 8, 2024, 06:45 AM ET

Company Participants

Andy Barnett - Head, IR

Pascal Soriot - CEO

Aradhana Sarin - CFO

David Fredrickson - EVP, Oncology Business

Susan Galbraith - EVP, Oncology R&D

Ruud Dobber - EVP, BioPharmaceuticals Business

Sharon Barr - EVP, BioPharmaceuticals R&D

Marc Dunoyer - CEO, Alexion

Iskra Reic - EVP of Vaccines & Immune Therapies

Conference Call Participants

James Gordon - JP Morgan

Emily Field - Barclays

Matthew Weston - UBS

Andrew Baum - Citi

Peter Welford - Jefferies

Mark Purcell - Morgan Stanley

Simon Baker - Redburn

Tim Anderson - Wolfe Research

Luisa Hector - Berenberg

Eric Le Berrigaud - Stifel

Gonzalo Artiach - ABG

Presentation

Andy Barnett

Well, a warm welcome everybody to AstraZeneca's Fourth Quarter and Full Year '23 Results Presentation Conference Call and Webcast for Investors and Analysts. I'm Andy Barnett, Head of Investor Relations. And before I hand over to Pascal and Members of the Executive Team, I'd like to cover some important housekeeping points.

Firstly, as I'm probably sure you realize all the materials are already on our website for your review. Here's our forward-looking statement, which I'd encourage you to take the time to read. We'll be making comments on our performance using constant exchange rates, or CER, core financial numbers and other non-GAAP measures. And non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliation is contained within the results announcement that you all have seen. All numbers quoted are in millions of U.S dollars unless otherwise stated.

This slide shows the agenda for today's call, following up our prepared remarks, we’ll open the line for questions. Of course, if you want to raise -- ask a question in the room, raise your hands, there'll be roving mics for those online, please use the zoom function to raise your hand. As usual, we'll try and get to as many questions as we can through the course of the call. But if you limit the number of questions you ask at once, it'll give others a fair chance to participate.

And with that, Pascal, I'm going to hand over to you.

Pascal Soriot

Thank you, Andy. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to this London Stock Exchange, where we are celebrating our 25th anniversary as a company, merging Astra from Sweden and Zeneca from the UK, quite a number of years ago. But I want to start my talk with this slide. And this slide is important because I want to recognize or celebrate the fact that not only it's our 25th anniversary, but importantly, we actually did achieve the goal we set ourselves 10 years ago to reach $45 billion sales in 2023.

And in fact, I could argue we over achieved it, because at the current exchange rates are $45 billion probably is closer to $40 billion. And I don't want to say that just to kind of pat ourselves on the back, even though I'd like to do this and celebrate our team's effort. But I want to mention it because, we always did this with our eyes on the long term and growth and we are embarking on another 10-year cycle.

And we have announced an R&D Day, because we want to refresh our strategy and show you what we are planning to do over the next 10 years. But we got this $45 billion throw ups and downs. And I have to say often a lot of skepticism, but always on with our eye on the long term growth rate. And that's what we're going do. We believe we can grow, and we believe over the next 10 years we will deliver superior growth. And that's, of course going to drive our profitability as a result of it.

But our growth and sustainable strong growth is really what we are after. And we've done this whole following the science and, again, we're embarking on a new cycle and we're investing in new science that will shape the future of medicine and shape the future of this company. And we can talk more about this. We have achieved this whole discipline investment, even though we often have extensive debates inside the company and are now is challenging everybody to be even more disciplined in terms of our investment. But we've constantly focused our investment on where we can deliver the most growth and also continuously focusing on oncology, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, more recently increasing our investment and keeping our eye on immune diseases and finally a rare disease.

And the company we have today, and the team we have today, is very different from what it was 10 years ago. And it's really a rewarding to see the progress we've made and the strengths we have developed in our portfolio, but also in the strength of the talent in the company. The way we operate in oncology today and in the same in the other is very, very different. And it gives me confidence, we can actually deliver another cycle of very strong growth over the next 10 years. ...

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