AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Pascal Soriot: Thank you, Aradhana. Maybe just one addition on the Vision 2022. The cost base is not that great, really relative to typical pharmaceutical products that you have to launch and promote. So the profitability in ’22 was actually pretty good. And in ’23, as Aradhana said, it will be very minimal. So you have to piece those elements together. But again, as I said earlier, if you do it, you will see that the underlying profitability of sorry, the profitability of the underlying business is improving very nicely from ’22 to ’23. We’ll take maybe the last question from Emmanuel Papadakis at Deutsche Bank. Over to you Emmanuel.

Emmanuel Papadakis: Perhaps a follow-up question on margins. Given you finished 22% or 30%, you guided for see our growth of low to mid-single digits for both revenues and OpEx that implies pretty limited expansion in ’23. So can you just reconfirm your commitment to the mid- to high 30s margin in the midterm and give us some sense of what the pathway looks like beyond 2023. When do we get to that mid-30s number, for example? And then maybe a second question on Lynparza ahead of the Propel, the delayed PDUFA decision. Could you give us a sense of your current label expectations in light of both EMA decision and that slightly mixed overall survival data you presented us last year where there was an inversion of the early part of the curve.

To what extent is that might to be a problem when considering prospects from ComerLabel? And maybe since I’m the last person and I’ll try and squeeze in it. Dave, I think you mentioned it, I may have missed it enhertu market shares in second line HER2-positive and HER2 low. Where are they now? Where could they go?

Pascal Soriot: Aradhana, you want to — thanks, Emmanuel. Aradhana, do you want to take the first one?

Aradhana Sarin: Yes. So we are remaining committed to our ambition. Just as a reminder, that is an ambition and not guidance. And you can see we are constantly operating improving our operating margins. You can see that 2022 operating margins were better than 2021. We are continuously working on productivity improvements. But again, there are various elements everything from sort of a mix shift and mix improvement, gross margin improvement and, again, operating leverage on the SG&A line while not compromising on the investment in R&D. So again, it’s a balance that we try to strike between steadily improving our operating margin while still investing for that strong growth post 2025.

Pascal Soriot: Susan? Thanks, Aradhana.

Susan Galbraith: So in terms of the PROPEL data, we are confident in the benefit risk. Across the patient population, so in the ITT, so including the HRR and BRCA wild type. We also have confidence in the biological plausibility of the benefit of interaction between PARP inhibition and androgen receptor inhibition. Because actually androgen receptor signaling is involved in DNA repair in AR-driven cancer cells. And we’ll present not just — we’ll present some clinical data looking at this interaction in the ASR prostate cancer meeting which is in March, I believe. So I think you have to understand what the rationale is for why the interaction is relevant in the wild-type population as well as in the HRR mutated population. And then you have to look at the overall clinical benefit which with a 5-month improvement in PFS and a trend to improvement in OS with curves, Yes, they separate late but they look good I think that we’re confident in that overall population and we’re happy to see that we actually got that reflected in the EU label.

So we’ll continue to dialogue with the regulators around the world on this.

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