Mark Crossley
Analyst · Stifel. Please go ahead
Good morning and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Mark Crossley, CEO and I'm joined today by my colleagues Ryan Preblick, Interim Chief Financial Officer; Javier Rodriguez, Chief Legal Officer; and Christian Heidbreder, Chief Scientific Officer. I'll make some opening remarks and then Ryan will provide a rundown of our first half and Q2 financials as well as fiscal year 2020 planning assumptions. Finally, Christian will update you on R&D activities before we close and take your questions. Turning to slide five, before I get into the detail of our performance and progress, I would like to say a few words in my new role as CEO. I want to leave you with no doubt that I believe Indivior has a great future based on its compelling vision its people and its unique capabilities. In the face of the challenging backdrop over the past several years from generic film entry to the various legal matters and now COVID-19, we have persevered and continued to make strong strategic progress in establishing a durable growth platform with our two differentiated depot technologies SUBLOCADE and PERSERIS. The evidence of our future success has been building. As you'll recall, we were seeing tangible results of our SUBLOCADE strategy in the first part of 2020 as KPIs and net revenue started to accelerate. As such my near-term strategic priorities are to manage through COVID-19 and to recapture the previous strong momentum with SUBLOCADE and PERSERIS; to maintain our financial flexibility as we remain in a transition period with film erosion expected to continue and the need to invest behind our depot technologies in the U.S.; and three, to resolve remaining litigation having put the important DOJ matter behind us. With increased financial flexibility and visibility, we have the opportunity in due course to be more active in business and pipeline development and to look more closely at our overall capital structure. These form central elements of our core long-term aspirations. However, for the time being you should not expect an immediate change in our capital allocation priorities. I'm also pleased that despite the inevitable uncertainty that surrounds any leadership change, the transition following Shaun stepping down has gone very smoothly. Shaun played a key role at Indivior as a founder CEO and made a significant contribution in advancing addiction treatment across communities globally for which we are grateful. I am proud and humbled to have been appointed as CEO of Indivior and privileged to work with such a talented team. And as many of you know in my previous roles, I helped develop the strategy we are executing. I believe that the continuity I bring to the CEO role will continue to be important in keeping our employees focused on our vision in elevating the leadership role that Indivior will continue to play in helping patients, doctors, and communities fight the human crisis of opioid addiction. As you see on slide six, the message when looking at our financial performance is that we're navigating well through the challenging conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. When we last spoke in May we set out a clear plan on how we intended to manage and progress our business, while at the same time, protecting our employees and securing consistent medicine supply for our patients. I believe we have delivered solidly against these objectives. Ryan will provide additional details in a moment, but I would call out that our first half net revenues and adjusted net income were ahead of expectations, especially considering the impacts of COVID-19 across our business. Gross cash at period end of over $900 million was also strong. These results principally reflect the continued resilience in SUBOXONE Film the acceleration of the BMAT market to low-teens levels and increasing year-over-year contribution from SUBLOCADE. Looking more closely at the performance of our depot technologies. As expected the good momentum that SUBLOCADE and PERSERIS were experiencing in the first part of the year was adversely impacted by COVID distancing restrictions, which took effect from the second half of March. Considering that the field force was working remotely the entire second quarter, we're very pleased with SUBLOCADE's Q2 net revenue performance of $29 million, which brings the half one net revenue to $58 million, up 100% versus a year ago. Looking to the back half of 2020, the ongoing impacts of the pandemic remain unpredictable. However, having exited the first half of 2020 and effectively managed through one quarter of COVID impacts, we have seen some level of comfort on the key drivers of the business. Ryan will share more detail on our overall planning assumptions for the remainder of 2020, but I want to stress that our assumptions are based on current market conditions which may change with any new government measures to restrict population movement. Turning now to the DOJ agreement. As you saw from the statement we published on July 24 we have agreed to settle all outstanding legal matters together with the associated FTC and State Attorney Generals for a total cash fine of $600 million. The amount is payable over seven years to 2027. The immediate payment is $100 million with the next payment of $50 million not due until January 2022. An important element of the settlement is that it leaves the group free to continue doing business with government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. We will also operate under a corporate integrity agreement for five years. Overall, we are pleased to have achieved the resolution so that we can move forward in a way that provides greater certainty for our business, our communities, and our stakeholders. I want to move now to a more detailed update on SUBLOCADE starting on slide eight. As I mentioned earlier, up to March, we were seeing positive impacts from our growth strategies. In terms of the commercial elements of the strategy, our penetration of organized health systems combined with the SUBLOCADE direct-to-consumer campaign resulted in enrollments accelerating from Q4 2019 into January and February. However, as stay-at-home orders were issued at the second half of March, we experienced an abrupt change in market conditions. In line with industry trends, we also started to see a material drop-off in enrollments for SUBLOCADE. And this trend extended through the second quarter with our sales force out of the field for the entire period. However, we're pleased to see that the base of existing SUBLOCADE and PERSERIS patients was significantly less affected than the enrollment activity, which relies more heavily on new patient and HCP generation. And we are very encouraged to see relatively stable repeat injection activity in line with our prior retention curves. The relative resiliency amongst existing SUBLOCADE HCPs in patients clearly demonstrates what we have always observed which is that experience with the treatment once gained is extremely positive. Additionally, while we've been unable to visit new HCPs, we have remained able to work productively with organized health system partners to contract and access new systems and remain on track with our internal KPIs for 2020. Looking more closely at the foundational elements of the strategy. We are pleased to see that all key metrics associated with the prescription journey, most importantly the dispense yield continued to hold up in the face of COVID. This speaks to the hard work we undertook to establish a robust distribution system to achieve prescription dispense yields and journey times at or ahead of analogues. Turning to slide nine. We have seen a modest pickup in new patient enrollments from the Q2 levels. Consequently, our current expectation is that SUBLOCADE units and net revenues have troughed. As we speak today about 80% of our U.S. salesforce are back in the field, but activity is tempered by the fact that still only approximately 50% of our target HCPs report seeing patients at pre-COVID levels. And that fewer than 25% report allowing pharmaceutical reps into their offices. This is resulting in a reduction of total call volume as well as much lower than -- lower in-person call volume which is currently running in the 20% to 25% pre-pandemic levels. This said, as displayed in the first quarter acceleration of KPIs and net revenue we do remain confident we have the right product as well as the strategy people and culture with which to achieve our target net revenue of $1 billion. We've executed well on the controllable elements and in line with our strong operational discipline, we continue to advance our SUBLOCADE strategy strategic focus areas. Namely in the commercial element, we have fully converted all promotional materials to digital and have invested in and greatly improved our overall digital and remote sales capabilities. This will be an important differentiator if the COVID pandemic proves to be an enduring factor. We have also relaunched sublocade.com to provide a more user-friendly interface aligned with our new messaging. At the same time, we have continued our robust compliance training for the field team. Continuing to expand into the OHS channels is critical to achieving our long-term ambitions for SUBLOCADE. And in a moment, I will provide more color on our progress and strategy for this increasingly important growth lever. As we've indicated before, we're continuing to focus our field efforts on organized health systems because they have infrastructure and capabilities to better handle specialty products like SUBLOCADE. And with foundational elements continuing to perform well before and during COVID, we feel more confident about our ability to increase health care provider and patient throughput. Finally, Christian will provide an update momentarily, but I want to applaud our R&D and medical teams. They have worked tirelessly to keep our disease treatment awareness and scientific strategies on track as much as possible through COVID. Turning to slide 10. Recall, we began piloting our organized health systems strategy in 2019, initially targeting around 320 organizations principally across IDNs, Federal systems and the criminal justice System. Over the course of the last 1.5 years, we've established strong capabilities in this area with increasing levels of commercial resources dedicated to these efforts. This channel now accounts for one-third of SUBLOCADE's net revenue versus 15% a year ago and is disproportionately driving treatment growth. Perhaps most important the quality and depth of interactions has convinced us that further prioritization of organized health systems is the correct channel strategy for SUBLOCADE. The additional underlying dynamics in this channel include underutilization of buprenorphine medically assisted treatment more patients per HCP and generally greater resources which create a major opportunity for continued penetration and upside. As such, we expect to continue to increase the weight of our commercial efforts in this area going forward. And with our strengthened team, we are now targeting 500-plus organizations across the organized health system spectrum. These organizations include around 25,000 wavered HCPs and around one million patients representing a substantial and growing part of the overall Opioid Use Disorder patient funnel. Based on strong progress to-date and our investment in the space, we expect the organized health system channel to continue to grow in importance as a source of business moving forward. Turning to PERSERIS on slide 12. As with SUBLOCADE the first half for PERSERIS was a tale of two quarters. In the first quarter, we had already built a solid foundation with parity payer access and traditional sampling activities. Despite competitive response from some of the incumbents, we continue to receive positive feedback from HCPs especially on the simplicity of the treatment initiation where I remind you there is no need for loading or supplemental doses of oral risperidone. This led to increasing sales in the first quarter that confirmed the potential for PERSERIS. In the second quarter, however, the pause in face-to-face physician consultations impacted the upward trajectory. As a new treatment option among established participants, PERSERIS has a particularly high sensitivity to active promotion. The net result was we delivered first half net revenue of $7 million. Through COVID, the field leadership team has continued to motivate our relatively small field force with continued coaching and training. Our immediate priorities are reengaging in face-to-face meetings with psychiatrists who treat extensively in the schizophrenia space and resuming peer-to-peer educational programs. We will also further leverage our organized health system team and pursue targeted opportunities in state hospital systems the VA and assertive community treatment programs. On my final slide, just a reminder, that as the global leader in addiction it is not just about the United States. We've had some exciting developments outside the U.S. as SUBLOCADE is now available in Canada and Australia. Most recently, it has also been approved in Finland and Sweden. In other key EU markets, we are continuing to respond to normal course regulatory authority inquiries. Staying with European developments. We're pleased to note in our press release the approval of SUBOXONE Film. This includes the 27 member states. We're working through the listing and pricing process across the key countries and expect film to start becoming available in the first quarter of '21. SUBOXONE has also just approved in Canada and we expect availability there on similar timing. Putting it all together, we would expect a more meaningful net revenue contribution from these new opportunities outside the U.S. beginning in 2021 as pricing and subsequent launches become more visible. We will of course remain disciplined in allocating appropriate levels of investment expenditure to these ex-U.S. markets depending on the external environment and the scope of the opportunities. With that I'd like to hand over to Ryan to take you through the details of the financials.