Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Schott: Just one question and one quick clarification. I guess, on operating margins, and this is a question maybe beyond €˜23. I’m just trying to think through the balance of, I guess, on one hand, some of the inflation headwinds potentially decreasing as you work through some of this inventory, I guess balanced against the STELARA LOE and some of the dissynergies from the spin. So, I guess, as something kind of bigger picture about operating margins, is 2023 a decent proxy going forward, or could we see either modest erosion in margins or expansion, or is it too early to call? I’m just trying to get just some sense of how that plays out. And then my second question, which is just maybe a clarification on some of the immunology comments you made regarding 4Q.

I think you mentioned unfavorable mix and rebate dynamics as headwinds. Should we expect those dynamics to continue in €˜23? And I guess, are they getting worse, or is this more just a continuation of what you’ve seen in the last few years that rebates are just kind of like gradually going up for that franchise as a whole? Thanks so much.

Joe Wolk: Great. Good morning, Chris. I’ll tackle the operating margin question, and then I’ll turn it over to Joaquin for some of the immunology references. So with respect to operating margin, I think, while we don’t give multiyear guidance, I think this year does portend to have a considerable achievement in terms of managing cost by the organization in addition to inflationary pressures. And again, that’s not combated with an assumption that we’ll see deflationary relief. We also have the dissynergies that come along with the consumer separation itself. As the comments indicated, we plan to address all of those, and we’ve already started in mid-2022 to mitigate some of those. They’ll be fully mitigated by 2024. So, I would think just looking out now qualitatively, €˜23 and €˜24 may look similar because you’ve got some different dynamics playing out, and we’ll certainly have to see how inflation plays out over the course of this year.

And then, getting back on a more normal cadence, I would say, you would expect from Johnson & Johnson, you know that we like to grow income a little bit faster than sales growth. And you do that by improving your margin profile. We have $60 billion of resources in a given year. So, we’ve got a responsibility, we think, to continue looking at our prioritization, and our processes and technology to make sure that we are being not only as effective as we can be but also as efficient as we can be.

Joaquin Duato: Thank you. And Chris, regarding the dynamics in the immunology market, overall, what we see is that the patient mix is changing, putting more pressure in our overall net price by having a higher participation of some channels, we are lower priced. We see those situations continuing into 2023, but not getting worse. Simply the situation that we are now will continue into 2023, but will stabilize from where we are.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Matt Miksic from Barclays.