Earnings Labs

Novo Nordisk A/S (NVO)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 8, 2014

$42.56

+5.60%

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Transcript

Executives

Management

Lars Rebien Sørensen - Chief Executive Officer Kåre Schultz - President and Chief Operating Officer Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen - Chief Science Officer and Executive Vice President Jesper Brandgaard - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Chairman of the Board - Novo Nordisk Engineering A/S and Chairman of the Board - Novo Nordisk IT A/S Lars Rebien Sørensen: [Audio Gap] But apart from that, I'd like to welcome you all to the Novo Nordisk half year conference call and investor meeting here in London. And this year, we bring the strongest team that we have ever been able to bring with almost the entire management team, as you will see, sitting up there. But in case there are things we cannot manage, then we have also brought the Chairman of the company, Göran Ando, who's sitting up in the front, and well-known former executives from a number of different pharmaceutical companies who are helping us steering in the right direction. Also as a change this time, we have changed -- tried to innovate the format a little bit. We don't know really how it's going to go, but we have inquired how you would like to do this and we thought that this time, we should try something different. So basically, what we will be doing is we're giving you a presentation much more or less following what you have in front of you. Then we will breaking and breaking into 4 groups. These 4 groups will be circulating to 4 different stations, being able to confront management with different perspectives of their interests. So basically, it's a Q&A session spread into 4 smaller groups and let's see how it works. The only thing we have to apologize is for those that are listening in on the web. Obviously, you're going…

Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen

Chief Operating Officer

Thank you very much, Kåre. First of all, if we take a look at the R&D pipeline as it looks today, I think what is evident is that the company has over the last many, many decades been very convinced about the need to do 2 things: on the one hand, have replacement power. And by that, I mean that if you have one generation of insulins and we all realize there's still unfulfilled medical needs in terms of, for instance, insulin therapy, it's extremely important that products like NovoRapid, Levemir and NovoMix have successors like Tresiba, Ryzodeg and the faster-acting aspart product. Likewise, it's important to use your protein engineering and design skills in the context of creating whole new innovation, new products like we've seen in Victoza. And once you have a new product class like the GLP-1, it's critically important to use your portfolio skills to move from just having type 2 diabetes approved, to broadening the label into type 1 diabetes, having a whole new product in the realm of obesity, opening up theoretically for a new therapeutic area for the company, but also do more transformational things like turning injections into orals such as is the case with the oral semaglutide, you can see being in Phase II. Likewise, for convenience purposes, we realize that the market is split into 2 beliefs. The once-daily belief and the once-weekly or even less-frequent belief in terms of administration of products, which is why we have a -- what we believe to be a superior once-weekly GLP-1 offering in the term of semaglutide in Phase III. Now if we look specifically at DEVOTE, I think you're all aware that we started in October of last year, and we had a communication related to the duration of the trial…

Jesper Brandgaard

Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Mads. Here, you have a slide with all the numbers for the first 6 months. A few key comments from me. Sales growth was significantly impacted by currencies. Sales was growing 1.5% reported and around 7% in local currency, so about 5.5% negative currency impact. Our gross margin expanded by 40 basis point -- had a 40 basis point negative currency impact. So in local currency, we saw approximately 80 basis points improvement in our gross margin, primarily driven by higher prices in the U.S. and an improved product mix where Novo Nordisk was selling more, as Kåre was alluding to, of our modern insulins and Victoza. For the full year, I would anticipate that our gross margin would expand in local currency in the vicinity of 50 basis points. Looking at sales and distribution costs. This has been a key driver of our operating performance in the first half. There's been a very cautious spend linked to the very cautious developments to start the sales in the U.S. and also in Europe, but also reflecting some adjustments to legal provisions. I would anticipate, as we move into the second half, that we will see a speedup of our promotional activities, especially in the U.S. We have at the mid-June launched FlexTouch, our new device, with Levemir in the U.S. And you should anticipate that there will be direct-to-consumer marketing for that product as we move along. And consequently, the sales and distribution costs will probably move towards the 27% mark. We traditionally have a higher S&D spend in the second half of the year compared to first half. Research and development. Mads was just alluding to the quite impressive pipeline we have. That has a cost consequence to it. It's certainly a higher proportion of the overall R&D…