Pascal Soriot
Management
Hello everybody. It’s Pascal Soriot here from AstraZeneca. It’s really a pleasure to welcome you to Q2 and Half Year Conference. It is my pleasure to introduce some of our team members here. Simon Lowth, of course our CFO; but also Briggs Morrison, our EDP for Global Medical Development; and Marc Dunoyer, who is our EDP for Product Strategy, M&A and Business Development and we also here in the room together with some of our Finance and Investor Relations team members. So I’d like to start by first giving you a high-level summary of the highlights for the quarter as I see them. Second quarter revenue was down by 4% on a CER basis, $500 million decline coming from loss of exclusivity, which is very much inline with our expectations. Despite this we saw a good double-digit increase from our four key growth platforms – five growth platform, sorry, which provided in aggregate more than $400 million of incremental revenue in CER terms. I would also highlight our growing late-stage pipeline with two NDA submissions, 1 Phase III start and more to come later this year and importantly three late-stage projects that have been added to our pipeline via business development. The headline from a sales and profit view point, as you can see here our revenue was down for the quarter by 4% in constant currency terms of $6.2 billion. Our core operating profit was down 10% as we continue to invest behind our growth platforms in our pipeline. Our core EPS was down 21% at CER with the main driver beyond the operating profit line, a higher tax rate in the quarter compared to last year, where we had a $0.19 per share benefit from tax settlements. And after the usual core adjusting items, reported EPS was $0.66…