George Grofik - Sanofi
Management
Good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call. Thank you for joining us to review Sanofi's second quarter 2016 results. As usual, you can find the slides of the call on the Investors page of our website at sanofi.com. Moving to slide 2, I'd like to remind you that information presented in this call contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially. I refer you to our Form 20-F document on file with the SEC and also our document de référence for a description of these risk factors. With that, please advance to slide 3, and let me introduce our speakers on the call today. With me are Olivier Brandicourt, Chief Executive Officer; Jérôme Contamine, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; as well as Elias Zerhouni, President, Global R&D. Also joining us today for the Q&A session the heads of our five global business units: Olivier Charmeil, Executive Vice President, General Medicines and Emerging Markets; Peter Guenter, Executive Vice President, Diabetes & Cardiovascular; Carsten Hellmann, Executive Vice President, Merial; David Loew, Executive Vice President, Sanofi Pasteur; and David Meeker, Executive Vice President, Sanofi Genzyme. First, Olivier will discuss the key highlights of the second quarter of 2016, then Elias will provide a summary of the progress we have made in the R&D in the quarter. After that Jérôme will review Sanofi's financial results before we open the call to Q&A. Before we start, I'd like to remind you of some important accounting items that affect the second quarter. First, as a result of the announcement of exclusive negotiations with Boehringer Ingelheim on the potential asset swap, certain changes in the way we report and present our results are required. Under current IFRS accounting standards, we need to report Animal Health separately as a discontinued operation. However, to help with your year-over-year comparisons, we will use the term aggregate, which simply means that our Animal Health business is included in our financial result lines as before. Second, given there has been no indication of improvement in the economic situation in Venezuela, Sanofi decided earlier this year to change the FX rate used for the Venezuelan bolivar. Sanofi now uses the DICOM exchange rate, which was around VEF628 per US$1. This new exchange rate replaces the official CENCOEX rate of VEF6.3 per US$1, which was used in the second quarter of last year. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Olivier.