Novartis provided the following update: “Our long-term strategy is to focus Novartis (NVS) as a leading medicines company with five priorities: embrace operational excellence, deliver transformative innovation, go big on data and digital, build trust with society, and build a new culture by unleashing the power of our people. During 2018, we took actions that reflect this strategy and our capital allocation priorities. We concluded the strategic review of Alcon and expect to spin-off the division in H1 2019. Alcon is positioned for sustainable long term top line growth and margin expansion as demonstrated by the strong 2018 results. We agreed to sell the Sandoz US oral solids and dermatology portfolio. Our planned Sandoz transformation is expected to enable us to compete in a more challenging environment by increasing our share of higher-margin differentiated products while driving efficiency with a geographic focus and a lean cost structure. Additionally we sold our stake in the GSK (GSK) consumer healthcare joint venture for $13B. This capital was re-deployed to drive long term growth through cutting edge advanced therapy platforms, including acquiring AveXis gene therapy, AAA and Endocyte radioligand therapies and expanding global manufacturing capacity for cell therapy Kymriah. Operationally, four additional drugs reached $1B and three more potential blockbusters were launched, Lutathera, Aimovig and Kymriah in DLBCL. Innovative Medicines margin increased by 1.0 percentage point to 32.0% of sales, and we expect this margin to expand further. Our culture is transforming to become more open, empowered and collaborative. We advanced an enterprise-wide digital transformation including the launch of the first digital cognitive therapy, reSET, and an artificial intelligence program to drive salesforce effectiveness by optimizing visits to healthcare professionals. We continue our journey to rebuild trust with society. For all our new medicines, we will systematically integrate access strategies in our research and development efforts and we are working to develop innovative treatments for under treated diseases. Additionally, Novartis improved to the number 2 ranking in the Access to Medicines Index for 2018.”
