J&J CFO Joseph Wolk on Q1 earnings

Johnson and Johnson out with its first quarter results just a few minutes ago, the stock marginally down on the news about 2% off, but we’re going to talk about this report because Joseph Woke is here, he’s Johnson Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. There were some pretty good numbers in here, Joe, So it’s nice to see you. I want to understand what you think went right and to the extent that maybe some of the markets are thinking that it didn’t go as right as I was thinking, What you think about that? Yeah, nice to be with you, Andrew. You know, we’re really encouraged by our first quarter performance. If you look at what we declared about 18 months ago, we wanted to be a more growthier company, right, considering the size of our company being about $85 billion in annual revenue. You saw that on display, we had 7.6% top line growth, 12.4% EPS growth. We’ve really done well with our pharmaceutical and Medtech business and pharmaceuticals specifically growing 8.3% with a number of new products continuing a very strong start to their launches. And while I’m encouraged by the the quarterly performance and I think that sets up really well for us to meet guidance that we set in January for the year actually improved that a little bit today. On the operational side, I’m really emboldened for what it meant for the future in terms of what we did in the first quarter with clinical milestones. So if you think about pharmaceuticals, we had five regulatory approvals. We filed three more submissions for new product approvals, a number of large clinical readouts at medical meetings and these are in important areas. So multiple myeloma, non small cell lung cancer for ulcerative colitis. We already have a great product Tremfya that’s known for psoriasis. Now we’re expanding to ulcerative colitis as well as a targeted oral peptide for the the treatment of psoriasis that is in the pill form versus needle form which could have higher rates of efficacy. And then on the Medtech side, we received CE Mark approval for our pulse field ablation to complement in the future our very successful electrophysiology business. On the capital allocation front, we remain very active 16.6% spent in R&D. To further strengthen the future, we were proud to declare this morning the 62nd consecutive year of a dividend increase for Johnson and Johnson. And then we closed an acquisition on the pharmaceutical side for antibody drug conjugate, which takes monoclonal antibodies, links that up with chemotherapy for targeted selection of killing cancer cells without the devastating effects, side effects that come with chemotherapy. And then about 11 days ago, we were pleased to announce our intention to acquire Shockwave Medical, which is a minimal minimally invasive calcification that was a 4.2% increase to the dividend. I do want to ask you though about full year because you beat on the quarter by six cents, you only raised the full year by two cents and maybe that’s part of the disappointment in the stock in the pre market session. Can you talk to us about how you see the rest of the year? Does it seem like you’re as optimistic perhaps as as first quarter results have come in? Yeah. Thank you, Melissa. Yeah, it’s just it’s early in the year and I think if you listen to and look at some of the clinical advancements we’ve had, we’re going to give our scientific teams every opportunity to accelerate those programs even further and then some new ones. So it’s just a matter of being early in the year, maybe looking for that opportunity to invest to again fortify that the future as opposed to being negative about anything on the horizon. Again, the first quarter was very encouraging to us. We, we are optimistic that we will hit the, the quarterly or the annual guidance that we provided in January, right.