Alcon Inc. (NYSE:ALC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Anthony Petrone: And congrats on into the year here. I have 1 on Aerie and then 1 for Tim on margins. Maybe, Dave, just to level set on Aerie Pharmaceuticals. Just maybe where inhibitor share sits today in the United States. I think Gary had a statistic where that was about 3% of the IOP market? And where do you think share can go over time for versus across the glans? Just trying to sort of level set the multiyear run here — and I’ll just put in the margin 1 quickly. Tim, on margins, you get the constant currency margin outlook for 2023. I’m just wondering when we level set that back to 2022, it looks like we’re still looking for 150 basis points at the midpoint. Even if we take constant FX effects out of it, I just want to make sure that math is correct.

David Endicott: Yes. Let me stop the row kinase discussion. I think we’re excited about the progress that’s being made from the acquisition forward. We’ve seen it kind of steady growth in the combination of both Rocklatan and Rhopressa. Directionally, we are pleased with the progress. I don’t know that I want to speculate at this point in time how far we can go. I think we are working a lot on how to reposition both of those products. We also are working a lot on the managed market access element of it. And I do think those are largely the developments that we can add and I think we — along with a little bit more promotional effort, we hope to take it off of its current trend. But to do that, obviously, we need to be successful with both the repositioning of these products and also the access element.

Obviously, it’s about — it is about — you got it about right. It’s about 2% combined right now a little bit more than that. And directionally, it’s a very small part of the glaucoma market, albeit a lot of the glaucoma market is generic. So if you look at the — probably the achievable markets, we’re very realistic about what we expect but above the mind that we can bend the trend up from where we sit.

Tim Stonesifer: Yes. And then on the margin, you’re in the ball, the right ballpark, Anthony. I mean if you think about moving from the 18% up to the 19.5% to 20.5%, we would expect gross margins to improve. We’ve got a lot of productivity initiatives in place. We also have inflation subsiding a little bit in the second half. So that should be helpful. There’ll probably be some pressure on the R&D line. Our R&D expense in 2022 was roughly 8% of revenue. That’s going to be a little bit higher as we integrate Aerie because we’re doing some work there. So I’d expect a little bit of pressure there. On the last call, we talked about the additional transformation so that $100 million of savings. That’s obviously going to drop through to the margin rate.

That alone is probably 100, 110 basis points. And then we continue to get leverage. We’re not on the SG&A front. So it probably won’t be as high as the last year given the revenue growth. And when you take out the transformation but we continue to expect that. So those would be the levers to get you to that 19.5% to 20.5%.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Larry Biegelsen with Wells Fargo.

Larry Biegelsen: Two for me. I wanted to start on the U.S. and the market growth embedded in the guidance here. And then I wanted to ask a second 1 on just kind of revenue cadence for the year. Just starting on the market growth, Dave or Tim, can you talk about what you’re seeing in the U.S., your organic growth in the U.S. has been in the low single digits the past 3 quarters. And is that why you expect market growth to be below historical averages in 2023? And what are you modeling for market growth in ’23? Obviously, it looks like it’s probably sub-5%. And I had 1 follow-up.

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