PFE earnings call for the period ending September 30, 2024.
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Pfizer (PFE -1.39%)
Q3 2024 Earnings Call
Oct 29, 2024, 10:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, everyone, and welcome to Pfizer’s third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Francesca DeMartino, chief investor relations officer and senior vice president. Please go ahead, ma’am.
Francesca DeMartino — Senior Vice President, Chief Investor Relations Officer
Good morning, and welcome to Pfizer’s earnings call. I’m Francesca DeMartino, chief investor relations officer. On behalf of the Pfizer team, thank you for joining us. This call is being made available via audio webcast at pfizer.com.
Earlier this morning, we released our results for the third quarter of 2024 via a press release that is available on our website at pfizer.com. I’m joined today by Dr. Albert Bourla, our chairman and CEO; and Dave Denton, our CFO. Albert and Dave have some prepared remarks, and we will then open the call for questions.
Members of our leadership team will be available for the Q&A session, including Dr. Andrew Baum, who recently joined Pfizer as EVP and chief strategy and innovation officer. Before we get started, I want to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements and discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. I encourage you to read the disclaimers in our slide presentation, the press release we issued this morning and the disclosures in our SEC filings, which are all available on the IR website on pfizer.com.
Forward-looking statements on the call are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties, speak only as of the call’s original date, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of the statements. With that, I will turn the call over to Albert.
Albert Bourla — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Francesca. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Our team continues to execute, and we are pleased to report another quarter of strong performance.
We are guided by our purpose of delivering breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. And I’m proud that we have reached more than 270 million patients with our medicines and vaccines through the first nine months of 2024. The focus on execution excellence is starting to deliver results with market share gains in the U.S. and international, as well as robust growth in revenues and EPS.
As a result, we are raising guidance ranges and for our full year 2024 total revenues and adjusted diluted earnings per share. In January, we presented the five key priorities that would guide Pfizer during our year of execution. Today, you will hear how we advanced our business in the third quarter with each of the strategic priorities. I will focus on highlights, showing our progress with the first three.
Dave will discuss our continued work to reduce our cost base, expand our margins and strategically deploy our capital. Then we will review our financial performance during the quarter and explain why we believe we are well positioned to deliver on our financial commitments and create long-term value for shareholders, and then we will take questions. So with that, I’ll turn to our performance against our priorities during the quarter. Stated simply, Oncology is having a great year and delivered another quarter of strong performance, with 31% year-over-year performance growth resulting from solid demand across our product portfolio that includes legacy Seagen and legacy Pfizer products.
We set a goal to achieve world-class Oncology leaders. In the U.S., we are already the third largest biopharma company in oncology by revenue through the first half of 2024, and we are proud of the progress we are making toward our goal. Demand continued to increase for XTANDI, the market leader for four types of advanced prostate cancer, grew 28% year over year. TALZENNA grew by 77% in the quarter versus the same quarter from a year ago.
We are encouraged by the opportunity to further advance the prostate cancer treatment landscape based on the exciting overall survival data we announced earlier this month from the Phase III TALAPRO study. TALZENNA in combination with XTANDI demonstrated statistically significant overall survival benefit in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer becoming the first and only such combination to do so. Driving scientific breakthroughs in — cancer is one of the key areas of focus in Oncology. The TALAPRO-2 results show how we continue innovating to improve survival for men with prostate cancer, which is the second most common cancer in men and the fifth most common cause of cancer death among men worldwide.
We saw continued momentum during the quarter with the ongoing launch of PADCEV with pembrolizumab for patients with advanced metastatic bladder cancer, regardless of their eligibility to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy. This combination has quickly become the most prescribed first-line treatment in the U.S. for locally advanced metastatic urothelial cancer. In thoracic cancer, we achieved 31% operational growth this quarter with LORBRENA, a treatment for adult with ALK-positive metastatic noncell lung cancer.
Following the release of our five years of CROWN data during the Asco Annual Meeting, we are observing an acceleration of first-line new patient starts around the world and in particular, in our key markets of the U.S., China, Germany and France. Our BRAFTOVI and MEKTOVI combination also — strong year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 32%, primarily driven by growth in the metastatic non-small cell cancer indications. And we continue to be pleased by strong performance with the launch of ELREXFIO, which had about 80% sequential revenue growth over the second quarter of 2024. In the U.S., we have more than doubled our new patient starts since January.
In Japan, we were able to catch up with competition and launch as the first to market, BCMA bispecific, helping address an unmet medical need for patients with triple class exposed multiple myeloma. We believe ELREXFIO has the potential to be a transformative treatment option for people with multiple myeloma and we are continuing to advance development with four ongoing registrational studies in earlier lines of therapy, but if positive and approved, could support serving a way more expanded patient population. Now, I will turn to some select highlights of our continued strategical advancing our pipeline. We are prioritizing opportunities where we have scientific leadership and deep capabilities to address significant unmet patient needs.
Earlier, I spoke to the strength of our market Oncology medicines. Our pipeline, however, is what excites us the most. Lung cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer-related death around the world.
