Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited's CEO Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

During the quarter, we undertook an important initiative to streamline some of our commercial arrangements in the U.S. In the near and midterm, these changes will yield important financial benefits for Teva.

During Q1, however, these moves had a negative impact on revenues of approximately $180 million. Revenues were also impacted by currency exchange rates during the quarter of $81 million.

I would like to discuss just a few highlights from our major businesses during the quarter, and Eyal will elaborate later on all of our businesses in a greater detail in his remarks.

This was the second consecutive quarter of solid results in our U.S. generics business. Teva's world-class generics R&D, broad product portfolio, continuing improvements in service levels and deep customer relationships have enabled us to bounce back to enjoy growth of 29% year-over-year. During the first quarter, we launched 7 new generic products, representing over $10 billion in branded sales in the U.S. market, and a number of these launches were either exclusive, semi-exclusive or in limited competition markets.

In Europe, in spite of rough macroeconomic conditions, sales grew by 3% during the quarter in local currencies to $1.3 billion. We saw a significant increase in sales of our branded products due primarily to the inclusion of products we acquired from Cephalon, as well as the take-back of Copaxone distribution and marketing rights from Sanofi.

In fact, in the EU countries, where we recently took back Copaxone sales and marketing rights, however, its growth in units is about 7%. This offset lower generic sales due to the ongoing macroeconomic conditions and health care reforms in key European markets. Our strategy of diversifying our business in Europe geographically and from a product standpoint, as well as our significant footprint in the continent has helped us to successfully mitigate some of the prevailing pressures.

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