Viatris Inc. (NASDAQ:VTRS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

David Bayles : First of all, from the overall business point of view as well as between 2 divestitures, all our businesses are performing as we anticipated or better than we had anticipated, including whether it’s geography or whether it’s the brands, generics and those categories. And that holds basically true for also the businesses which we have identified and which are going through the divestiture. But also, Scott, to your point, the 3%, which we have growth, which we have indicated, just to add on to that, that included our base business, what we have in pipeline for today, that didn’t include any more deployment of the capital deployment, which may come from ’24 onwards, that will be on top of that. So I just wanted to also build upon that.

Sanjeev Narula: And one other thing to keep in mind, the business is that we’re divesting. Their margins are generally less than the company average. So what we expect post divestment, company’s margin like gross margin to be stable. From that perspective. That’s an important thing to keep in mind as well.

Scott Smith: I also want to piggyback off what Rajiv said. And as we start to really pivot to real growth from a revenue perspective and given our capital allocation plan and our desire to buy back shares. We can move the story to a long-term adjusted EPS growth story, which we’re very excited to move into that early part.

Operator: Our next question comes from Umer Raffat, Evercore.

Umer Raffat: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to focus on China business for a second. And it looks like your China business is holding in broadly fairly stable, except for FX. And it appears to be quite different in performance versus what some of your peer companies also with meaningful China businesses have reported. And I kind of see that not just on the emerging markets sales reported — sorry, Greater China sales reported but also in the product level breakout. So I’m just curious, what do you think is tracking different and or is there some timing of revenue recognition that is playing out and maybe we do see some weakness in 4Q? Because it does seem like it’s a little more industry-wide? Thank you.

Scott Smith: Umer, I can’t speak about our peers, I can speak about our China business, which right from ever since we have gone through this evolution around the policy dynamics and all that live through our 95% business has gone through the VBP. We had gone through the cycles of VBP. And we have taken this time to reorient and shift our business more towards a private paid channel. And that’s what we have seen. We have found that the equilibrium between the hospital and private pay channel, and we have been trying to invest more on that. And investing in the pipeline, for example, even this quarter, just getting the Yupelri positive data because Yupelri and Dymista performance now going through the approval channels and also the pipeline.

We cannot be more excited about what we are seeing in the underlying business or the fundamentals of our China business. Extending that to emerging markets. We take our time to figure out how to manage this the hybrid business we have between the brand as well as the generics, and we have found that sweet spot and you see emerging markets business, the brand is performing better than expected, generic performing better than expected. So I can speak about our business, we seem very confident and optimistic about this business, and that’s what is entering the stability to the base. And coupled with the new launches, new launch revenue, I think that’s what is driving based growth of 1% year-over-year, 1% which you see in that.

Operator: Our next question comes from Glen Santangelo, Jefferies.

Glenn Santangelo: Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to follow up, Rajiv, on some of the comments you were just talking about that the generics business was performing better than expected. Could you maybe talk about the pricing environment in terms of what you saw in the quarter? And if there’s any discernible trends that are worth sort of calling out? And any sort of comments around the sustainability of that recent trend would be helpful. Thanks.