Scott Smith
Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead with your question
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to announce we reported another strong quarter, our fifth consecutive quarter of operational revenue growth. We've had a great start to 2024. And with the completion of our divestitures in July, we are now an important inflection point for our company. Four years ago, Viatris embarked on a journey to build a new kind of health care company. By combining Mylan, a strong global generics company, and Upjohn, a division of Pfizer, with 20 of the most iconic off-patent brands, our goal was to build a unique global pharmaceutical company with the scale to bring patients access to high-quality medicines worldwide. The team has done an outstanding job of executing the plan that was laid out when the two companies were brought together. Among the many accomplishments we have, integrated two global companies, simplified and streamlined the business by completing our divestitures, returned the base business to growth, strengthened our balance sheet through significant debt paydown, returned capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases and importantly, we've already started to build our portfolio of innovative assets. As we move forward in the second half of the year and beyond, we want to accelerate growth and shareholder return by building on the strength of our base business with an expanding portfolio of innovative, best-in-class patent-protected assets that have the potential for meaningful revenue growth and patient impact. I believe we have all the components necessary to successfully execute our vision, including an extensive global footprint that reaches 1 billion patients annually, a globally integrated company with deep capabilities in manufacturing, medical and regulatory affairs and commercialization, a robust development engine across a number of therapeutic areas, sector-leading cash flow generation from our base business to fund our vision and continue returning capital to shareholders. And we have added new skills, new capabilities and new areas of expertise to our already strong and talented executive leadership team. Doretta Mistras, our Chief Financial Officer; Philippe Martin, our Chief R&D Officer; and Corinne Le Goff, our Chief Commercial Officer, joined the team within the last year and are on today's call. All great work over the last several years has put the company in a position to deliver on our future vision. As we move forward, we will focus on three strategic pillars. First, our diversified and growing base business. As we said, our extensive global footprint already reaches more than a billion patients every year. Our continued success in this part of our business comes from our large and diversified portfolio of generics and off-patent brands that extends across markets in therapeutic areas. Here, we have a clear legacy of deep product knowledge and extensive commercialization and development expertise. Second, our financial strength and significant cash flow. Our strong balance sheet and sector-leading cash flow generation differentiate us from our peers. We continue to deliver on our financial commitments, including debt reduction and returning capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. With divestiture proceeds now in hand, we have a clear line of sight to meet our long-term leverage target. And third, our expanding innovative portfolio. This area represents an increasing focus on efforts to identify that and secure best-in-class patented assets. We are looking for assets that target significant unmet medical need in areas in which the company can be successful. By expanding our innovative portfolio, we have the potential to drive accelerated and durable revenue growth. As you know, we've already made disciplined investments in innovative assets in cardiovascular disease and immunology with selatogrel and cenerimod. We are making significant progress in accelerating the development of these assets. The additional leadership and the scientific expertise we have brought in along with the impressive core of competencies in key areas such as global manufacturing, medical affairs, regulatory, legal and commercialization, will all drive the success of this innovative portfolio. We are already making progress on these three pillars, as evidenced by our strong results this quarter. I am pleased to report that in the second quarter, we delivered total revenues of $3.8 billion and operational revenue growth of approximately 2%. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.2 billion and growing approximately 2% from a year ago. Adjusted EPS was $0.69 per share. Second quarter free cash flow was $426 million, excluding the impact of transaction costs and taxes. It is important to note that we delivered new product revenue of $210 million in the quarter. With a strong second quarter results, we've seen momentum heading into the second half. As a result, we continue to expect 2024 year-over-year operational revenue growth of 2% and are raising our expected 2024 new product revenue range to $500 million to $600 million. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Corinne to share some of our observations from her first few months at Viatris. Corinne?