Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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I’m encouraged that our business is performing as expected through the first month of the year. However, consistent with our historical revenue patterns, we expect revenue in the first quarter of the year to be the lowest revenue quarter of the year and slightly below revenue in Q1 2022. At a portfolio level, we expect product sales to be unchanged from Q1 2022 and other revenues to be lower on a year-over-year basis due to the reasons set out above, including about $225 million related to COVID antibody sales in the first quarter of 2022. We anticipate about $80 million of foreign exchange headwinds in Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022. The total of all these items creates greater than $400 million of headwinds versus the first quarter 2022. So these revenue patterns, along with the timing of expenses, are expected to translate into our Q1 non-GAAP operating margin being below 50% as a percentage of product sales, although we continue to expect operating margin as a percentage of product sales to be roughly 50% for all of 2023.

Recall, this is all Amgen stand-alone. We will continue to focus on our legacy of execution excellence. In summary, despite macroeconomic headwinds, we delivered another strong year of financial results in 2022, keeping us on track with our long-term commitments to deliver through 2030 and beyond. Our confidence in the long-term growth of Amgen is strong and we look forward to completing the announced acquisition of Horizon during the first half of 2023 which will only strengthen our growth prospects. We would expect to provide updated guidance as appropriate at some point after the transaction closes. This concludes the financial update. My thanks to our 25,000-plus colleagues at Amgen around the world for their commitment to serving patients and their tireless efforts in 2022.

I’ll now turn it back over to Bob for our Q&A.

Bob Bradway: Okay. Well, thank you, Peter and Dave, for soldiering on despite the technical difficulties. And again, apologies to all of you who’ve dialed in to join us on the call and who found some disruption in the proceedings here. A number of you have e-mailed your questions to Arvind. What I’d like to suggest is that any of you who have questions, directly e-mail them now to Arvind and Arvind will read them and we’ll try to answer them here in the room. And let me just assure all of you that we will rearrange our schedule and be available to answer questions if we don’t get to it on this conference call, be available to Arvind and his team to answer questions you may have after we wrap up. So with that, let me turn to Arvind and we’ll tackle the questions that you’ve already submitted.

Arvind Sood: Yes. Thanks, Bob. And apologies to everybody for the technical difficulties that we have had. And as Bob said, just please e-mail your questions to me directly. So the first question that we have is from Yaron Werber of Cowen and he submitted 2 questions. His first question is that Amgen will move to fair value from equity method of accounting for BeiGene. As you also now own less than 19.9% equity in BeiGene, will Amgen stop consolidating BeiGene’s losses and profits from now on? And then the second question is, can you discuss when you plan to file the high concentration of AMGEVITA once you get the Phase III interchangeable data in the first half of 2023?

Bob Bradway: Okay. We do that in 2 pieces. Pete, why don’t you hit the accounting question?

Peter Griffith: Yes, quick question — quick answer. Thank you, Yaron, for the question. On BeiGene equity method of accounting, as I said in my remarks, we will record, in our GAAP income statement, the mark-to-market but that won’t be recorded in our non-GAAP income statement. So the answer is we will not include any earnings from — or losses as our share of BeiGene going forward in our non-GAAP income statement.

Bob Bradway: Okay. And then on AMGEVITA, why don’t we do a 2-parter there? Dave Reese and then Murdo, you may want to add some thoughts.

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