Siggi Olafsson
Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.
So Elliot, on the profitability, the overall business coming in at 28% versus what we --for the full year was 25.5% for fourth quarter. I think how you need to think about it is, obviously, when you have an exclusive opportunity, especially in the U.S., you traditionally have a higher profitability. And we saw that in the first two quarters of the year, where we didn’t have any exclusive product in third and fourth quarter, there was a lower profitability. That being said, keep in mind that in the new Teva, in the new combined Teva, with approximately 110 first to files, there will be regular launches of exclusive products that will keep pushing, obviously, the profitability higher. Is 25.5% the bottom of the curve? I don’t know, on Teva stand alone. Really it doesn’t matter because we are not --we are only running Teva stand alone in the first quarter of this year. I think that reflects somehow the reality when you don’t have any exclusive launch. But keep in mind that from fourth-quarter 2014 to fourth-quarter 2015, there is a 200-basis-point improvement the operating profit. So there were no exclusive launches in either quarter, so the base business, overall base business improvement from the 12-months period was 200 basis point from fourth quarter to fourth quarter. So I think the overall business is improving. With regards to the region, just quickly, U.S. has been stable over the year. I mentioned the pricing before. There is a lot of competition in the U.S., there is no question about it. As you well know, there is over 200 generic competitors in the U.S. market and the competition is fierce. The opportunity we have is basically the largest pipeline, and I think an extremely good supply chain. Our business in Europe has improved very significantly. Over the last two years, been a total turnaround of European business, even more than you see in the overall business. We launched an average around 20 new products in every market we have in Europe going forward. Very stable operation and has been built up very well. Probably the fastest growing opportunity net of FX is the growth market. How we explain growth market to market, which we would like to foresee to grow significantly, even to $7 million to $8 billion in revenue. Markets likes Russia, obviously, there is a huge FX impact in Russia. But the underlying business, the volume, the new launches, and the business we’ve run in Russia is outstanding. I’m very excited about the joint venture. We will hopefully close that transaction beginning of second quarter. We made a very significant acquisition in Mexico with Rimsa, which takes us to a top-tier company with a portfolio of both specialty and generic products. So that’s where we see the most growth going forward. But I think we have a very unique business model in the Teva generics today and feel that we are running on all cylinders.