AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 4 of 20

Pending necessary regulatory clearances, we anticipate the deal to close in the coming weeks. Together with my Alexion and AstraZeneca colleagues, I look forward to welcoming the talented LogicBio team in our organization, and I am optimistic as to what we can accomplish together to advance genomic medicine for the treatment of rare disease. And with that, I will turn to Slide 29, and hand over to Pascal.

Pascal Soriot: Thank you, Marc. Next slide please. Looking forward, our strategic priorities remain unchanged. We will continue to invest and grow our business with the aim to be at the forefront of industry — of our industry in the years to come. Aradhana described how we are being thoughtful and disciplined with each investment that we make, driving efficiencies and investing in new technologies to make our development and our commercialization efforts faster and more impactful. We also like to point out that we are in a fortunate position of having several high priority medicines in development, and new launches to support our industry-leading growth. Our long-term margin ambition has not changed. And as you know, the pace of continued margin expansion is dependent on our pipeline success, and also on some external factors, in particular, the evolution of currencies.

Delivering value to our shareholders is very important to us. Turning to our outlook for 2023. We will of course provide our guidance for the year with our full year results for 2022. But I would point out that we anticipate at least 18 Phase III trial readouts in the year. We also look forward to announcing a range of new phase restarts for key medicines as we strengthen our pipeline, and our business outlook for the next decade and beyond. Now, we’ll close with Slide 31. Importantly, I’ve just returned from the COP27 Conference and I would like to highlight our landmark announcement as an industry. Through the sustainable markets initiatives, Health Systems Task Force, which for those who do not know, is a public private partnership convene under the overhaul SMI umbrella, which was launched by King Charles, the 3rd 2 years ago.

We have collectively as an industry made significant commitments to tackle the climate crisis. The private sector organizations in this coalition will have their own decarbonization targets, including our own ambition zero carbon strategy. However, what makes this announcement unique is the taskforce ability to unite and drive collective action at scale, addressing emissions across our supply chains, patient care pathways and clinical trials, and setting a benchmark to inspire others. Society is increasingly looking for companies to step up and lead by example in addressing climate change. And that is what we intend to do. Now we’ll turn back to Andy.

Andy Barnett: Thank you, Pascal. If you turn to the next slide please, for those on the phone to ask a question, please use the raise the hand function. And we will attempt to answer as many questions as we can during the allotted time. However, please limit the number of questions that you ask to allow others on the call a fair chance to participate. Let’s now take the first question from the call.

A – Pascal Soriot: So the first question is Simon Baker, Redburn. Simon, over to you.

Simon Baker: Thanks for taking the question, Pascal. One, if I may, on oncology, but in two parts. The first one is fairly quick. Dave, I wonder if you could quantify the — any impact of stalking on the — from the maleate form of Calquence in the U.S? And then secondly, a question for both Dave and Susan. We’ve seen obviously a lot of developments in the third space this year, your positive data disappointments elsewhere. If I look what consensus estimates have done over the course of the year, they’ve — if anything they fall rather than vision. So that may just be a lagging effect on the part of the analysts. But I just want to how your view has changed on camizestrant, in light of what you’ve seen in terms of the data, and the market opportunity in light of disappointments elsewhere? Thanks so much.

Page 4 of 20