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

Daniel Buchta: My first question maybe on product launches. I mean, obviously, you were pretty active in the last 3 years, I would say, especially on the contact lenses side where you launched a lot of things. But looking back at what you announced on the last day in terms of products to come, I would say, at the moment, there is not so much left anymore. Can you give indications at least what would come in ’23 and also ’24 here? And then on the M&A side, obviously, we’re pretty active on the ophthalmic Rx side. Is there something left you could be interested in acquiring? Because in my view, there is just the large indications like what AMD left where outcome is not yet present. Would you help me hear that?

David Endicott: Sure. Look, we’re — we’ve got a lot of room left, both geographically and just as you think about where we are in the launch cycles for new product flow. So I would really point you at what we launched to a large degree over the last 24 months, most of those products are in their very early phases. So, I think what strikes me is our toric in particular, remember, we just launched DAILIES TOTAL1 torque. We just launched the P1 toric a little bit before that. Late in the year, we launched T30 Toric. We didn’t even get that out into Europe until this year. So there’s a lot of runway left for torics. And we start the dailies toric SiHy with almost a zero share. So we’re doing quite well there. We expect to continue to do that.

I think that if you look forward in the international markets, again, we have a lot of geographies yet to fill out with products. So we’ll talk a little bit more about the product flow in both the near term and the long term at our Capital Markets Day. But I do think that the way to read where we are right now in Vision Care is positive. And in Surgical, again, we just launched CLAREON last year and we haven’t even got that outside of Europe yet. So we’ve got Europe, U.S. but not any of the other markets. So remember, CLAREON is really first year last year. So we still got a lot of movement to go there. We’re rolling Vivity out in Japan this year, I think. And so we’ve got a number of things going on that I think keep the momentum moving in the business from new products.

But also, I would just say really important that we maximize all the things we’ve got as we continue to develop products for later this year, early next and we’ll talk more about those in Capital Markets Day. just — we are always interested in the major categories. So think about glaucoma, dry eye, retina, for sure. All of them are of interest to us. I think probably the way to think about where the world is right now is it seems like with the exception of the multibillion-dollar kind of retina products or kind of orphan products big pharma is not real interested in our space. And I think that’s for a lot of us who grew up in the space that’s not unusual. It’s kind of how Alcon grew up to begin with. Well, we did a lot with $100 million to $300 million products that — of which we had many.

And so while the big categories and some of the big products, you may not naturally know. I think what you’ll find is that there are a lot of nice, what I’ll call, kind of singles and doubles, I guess, in American baseball terms, where we’re moving the runners and doing a nice job of bringing in products that add value matter a lot to patients and matter a lot to the doctors who use them. So I’ll leave it at that but there’s quite a lot going on in the M&A space for us that we look at Obviously, we’re very careful about how we make decisions there and we tend to be a little bit conservative and disciplined around capital deployment.