MKKGY - Merck KGaA (MKGAF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-15 12:31:02 ET
Merck KGaA (MKGAF)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
May 15, 2024 08:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Constantin Fest - Head of Investor Relations
Belen Garijo - Chair & CEO
Helene von Roeder - CFO
Matthias Heinzel - CEO, Life Science Sector
Peter Guenter - CEO, Healthcare Business
Kai Beckmann - CEO, Electronics
Conference Call Participants
Sachin Jain - Bank of America
Richard Vosser - JPMorgan
Colin White - UBS
Peter Verdult - Citi
Emily Field - Barclays
Thibault Boutherin - Morgan Stanley
Oliver Metzger - ODDO BHF
Ed Hall - Stifel
Gary Steventon - BNP Paribas Exane
Rajesh Kumar - HSBC
Simon Baker - Redburn Atlantic
Florent Cespedes - Bernstein
Presentation
Operator
Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Merck Investor and Analyst Conference Call on the First Quarter 2024. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode.
I'm now handing over to Constantin Fest, Head of Investor Relations. He will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.
Constantin Fest
Thank you very much, Heidi. And a very warm welcome to this Merck Q1 2024 results call. My name is Constantin Fest, I'm the Head of Investor Relations here. And I'm delighted to be joined by Belen Garijo, Group CEO; as well as Helene von Roeder, Group CFO. For the Q&A part of this call we will also be joining by Matthias Heinzel, CEO of Life Science; by Peter Guenter, CEO of Healthcare; as well as Kai Beckmann, CEO of Electronics.
In the next couple of minutes of this call, we would like to run you through the key slides of this presentation, which will then be followed by Q&A.
With this, I'd like to hand over now to Belen to start. Over to you, Belen.
Belen Garijo
Thanks, Constantin, and welcome, everybody, to our Q1 earnings call.
I'm now on Slide number 5 of the presentation and would like to start with highlights. As you have seen earlier today, we delivered a very solid quarter despite the observed slight organic revenue decline and we are trending in the right direction with two of our three business sectors, having shown a very strong performance in Q1, and we expect growth to continues to improve from here.
Organically, Group sales declined by 1% and EBITDA pre went down by 5%. This paired with a two percentage point currency headwind leads to reported sales of EUR5.120 billion, which is a decline of 3%. The currency had a slightly dilutive effect on EBITDA pre, which was down by 8% to EUR1.454 billion.
EPS pre of EUR2.06 decreased 13% year-on-year. Healthcare was the top performer with 10% organic sales growth, driven by Erbitux, by Mavenclad and Bavencio. Electronics also showed a positive organic sales development in Q1 of 6% and this was driven by semiconductor solutions, which returned to growth year-on-year at an increase of 8%.
As expected, Life Science showed an organic sales decline against a particularly high base. As you may remember, we have not yet seen the full impact of the customer destocking in our Process Solution business in Q1 last year. Therefore, Life Science was down by 13%. While we no longer segregate the effect of COVID related sales, it is still represents a headwind for Life Science as well as for the Group in 2024....
Merck KGaA (MKGAF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript