Novartis AG (NVS) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

April 25, 2023 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks：

Operator

Good morning and good afternoon, and welcome to the Novartis Q1 2023 Results Release Conference Call and Live Webcast. Please note that during the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] A recording of the conference call, including the Q&A session, will be available on our website shortly after the call ends.

With that, I would like to hand over to Mr. Samir Shah, Global Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Samir Shah

Thank you very much and good morning and good afternoon everybody. Thank you once again for all the participants on the call and the webcast for taking the time to listen to our quarterly conference call.

Before I start, just a 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, its most recent quarterly results on Form 6-K that respectively were filed with and furnished to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

And with that, I'll hand across to Vas.

Vas Narasimhan

Thank you, Samir and thanks everyone, for joining today's call. If we move to slide four, Novartis delivered a strong first quarter to start the year. We had strong sales growth, robust margin expansion, we hit our key innovation milestones, and we're raising our full year 2023 guidance, which Harry will go through in more detail.

As you saw in this morning's press release, sales were up 8%, core operating income was up 15% in constant currencies. In Innovative Medicines, sales were up 7% and core operating income was up 18%. We achieved a core margin of 38.7% in IM, and Sandoz was up 8% with core operating income up 3%.

I'll go through some of the innovation milestones in the subsequent slides as well as an update on our recent approvals of our Milburn and Zaragoza manufacturing facilities.

Now, moving to slide five, our key 2023 readouts for our upcoming high-value medicines remain on track. You surely saw earlier in the quarter, our Phase 3 NATALEE trial in adjuvant breast cancer testing this medicine in a broad patient population, have met its primary endpoint at its second interim analysis.