Novartis Ag
Q4 2022 Earnings Call
Feb 01, 2023, 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 Q4 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
And thank you very much, operator. And thank you to everybody for participating on what is a very busy day for reporting in pharma, European pharma. Before we start, just reading the safe harbor statement. The information presented today contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors.
These may cause 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
Thanks, Samir, and thanks, everyone, for joining today's conference call. I really appreciate your interest in the company and our update for the full year 2022. If we move to Slide 4, this year, as you saw in our earnings release or in 2022, we delivered what we believe is really robust core operating income growth and margin expansion. From a sales standpoint, you saw Q4 sales up 3%, with IM delivering Q4 sales of 3% [Inaudible] sales.
Productivity standpoint, we had a 15% core operating income growth in quarter four, and Harry will go a little bit further through the dynamics that drove that. But for the full year, that led to 8% core operating income growth ahead of our guidance. And that leads us to have now a margin, for IM in quarter four, of 36.4%, and on the full year, 36.9%. And as a reminder, taken together, inclusive of corporate costs, we are well on our way now toward our 40% core margin guidance for the medium term.
Now in terms of innovation, some important milestones, we'll go through those in a bit more detail. And we continue our journey on ESG, sustainability-linked bond. We continue to progress toward our 2025 targets. We had 31 million patients in our Novartis flagship programs, and we continue to have solid ratings across the key ESG rating agencies.