CA - Pfizer Inc. (PFE) CEO Albert Bourla presents at Goldman Sachs 45th Annual Global Healthcare Conference (Transcript)

2024-06-10 14:12:08 ET

Pfizer Inc. (PFE)

Goldman Sachs 45th Annual Global Healthcare Conference

June 10, 2024, 11:20 AM ET

Company Participants

Albert Bourla - Chairman and CEO

Conference Call Participants

Chris Shibutani - Goldman Sachs

Presentation

Chris Shibutani

Okay, let's kick off our discussion with Pfizer here. My name is Chris Shibutani. I'm a member of the Goldman Sachs Healthcare Research Team. Thank you so much to everybody here for joining us for this conference and for this discussion. Super pleased to have Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, to join us here and sit down and have a conversation. Extremely timely, so many things to cover. I think your team had wanted you to be able to just sort of kick off with a couple of opening comments, maybe to contextualize our discussion, and we'll go from there.

Albert Bourla

Yeah, of course. Thank you very much for being here, everyone. 2023 was a difficult year for us when it comes to stock performance. We were very disappointed to see that happening. We tried to understand the reasons and tried to make sure that we have a plan to bring it back. And then we announced our plan earlier in the year in ‘24, and it was based on five points. The first point was we need to make sure that we integrate Seagen in a way that we develop oncology leadership. I think that is going very well. We presented our first quarter results that showed that not only the Seagen and oncology business internal didn't go down, which is the expectations in the first six months of every merger, because people are changing brands and people are changing customers and bosses and all of that. Actually, we had the growth, which was very impressive. And then in ASCO, we had significant presence of the pipeline, which is the second priority that we have to make sure that our pipeline continues to evolve. Oncology is a very big part of it, but not only. We have right now a lot of readouts that we expect by the end of the year. The third priority was to make sure that all these new launches that we have done will perform well, that will maximize the performance of the new launches. We did an unprecedented number of new product introductions in basically last year. And we're not that happy with the way that all of them went commercially. So we took some measures in the commercial operations so to make sure that that will work well and that's a priority for us. Capital allocation is a very clear priority. Dividend, we said multiple times, is the sacred cow, so this is number one. Second, of course, de-levering our balance sheet and paying out debt, and of course increasing EBITDA to de-lever. You need to do both to be able to de-lever. And then of course investing in the business and buybacks. And those were the fundamental things that we said that we are going to do. And we are, I think the Q1 was quite good. We had a good progress towards all of them. And I'm looking forward to present to this discussion to start with and then to present our results of the second quarter at the end of July, I think beginning of August....

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