Novartis
Q1 2022 Earnings Call
Apr 26, 2022, 8:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good morning, and good afternoon, and welcome to the Novartis Q1 2022 results release conference call and live webcast. [Operator instructions] With that, I would like to hand over to Mr. Samir Shah, global head of investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Samir Shah -- Global Head of Investor Relations
Thank you very much, everybody. And good morning, and good afternoon to all participants. Thank you for joining us today for Novartis' Quarter 1 2022 results. Before we start, just wanted to go through the safe harbor statements.
The information presented today contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. These may cause the actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. For a description of some of these factors, please refer to the company's Form 20-F and its most recent quarterly results on Form 6-K that, respectively, were filed with and furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
And with that, I'll hand the call to Vas.
Vas Narasimhan -- Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Samir, and thanks, everyone, for joining our conference call today. If we could move forward a few slides. So, with me today, I have Harry Kirsch, our chief financial officer; and Karen Hale, our chief legal officer. If we go to Slide 4, overall, the quarter came out with a solid start for Novartis across all of our four key pillars.
From a growth standpoint, good sales growth, both at the IM and Sandoz and, of course, the overall group level, good productivity. Group core operating income up 9% on a constant currency basis, as well as a solid result in both IM and Sandoz. Some important innovation milestones, I'll go through those in a bit more detail. And we also continue to advance our ESG agenda in AMR, as well as access to medicines agreements in Africa.
So, I think a solid quarter that we can build on over the course of this year. Moving to the next slide. Our Innovative Medicines sales grew across both our U.S. and ex-U.S.
geographies, 3% in the U.S., 5% ex-U.S. in constant currencies, with growth drivers now accounting for 56% of our IM sales growth of -- the growth drivers up 21% quarter over quarter. So, a nice demonstration that we continue to replace our sales base with newer and newer products. Now, moving to Slide 6, we saw strong performance on our key growth drivers, the six brands we've been consistently highlighting.