Pfizer Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

Pfizer Inc. (PFE)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
February 3, 2010 10:00 a.m. ET

Executives

Charles E. Triano – Senior Vice President of IR
Jeffrey B. Kindler – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Frank A. D''Amelio – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Ian C. Read - Senior Vice President and President, Worldwide Pharmaceutical Operations
Martin Mackay - Senior Vice President and President - Pfizer Global Research & Development
Mikael Dolsten - Senior Vice President & President, BioTherapeutics Research & Developmen

Analysts

Catherine Arnold - Credit Suisse
David Risinger - Morgan Stanley
Jami Rubin - Goldman Sachs
Eric Lo - Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
Timothy Anderson - Sanford Bernstein
Seamus Fernandez - Leerink Swann
Chris Schott – J.P. Morgan
Marc Goodman - UBS
Anthony Butler - Barclays Capital
Steve Scala - Cowen
David Maris – Calyon Securities

Presentation

Operator

Mr. Chuck Triano, Senior Vice President Investor Relations, you may begin your call.

Charles E. Triano

Thank you, operator and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review Pfizer''s fourth-quarter and full-year 2009 performance, 2010 financial guidance and 2012 longer-range targets.

I am here with Jeff Kindler, Frank D''Amelio, Ian Read, Martin Mackay, Mikael Dolsten, Amy Schulman, among others. The financial charts that will be presented on this call can be viewed on our home page at www.Pfizer.com in the Investor Presentations tab by clicking on the link, Quarterly Corporate Performance Fourth Quarter of 2009.

Before we start, I would like to remind you that our discussions during this conference call will include forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in Pfizer''s 2008 Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our reports on Form 10-Q and Form 8-K. Also, the discussions during this conference call will include certain financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliation of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in Pfizer''s current report on Form 8-K dated February 3, 2010. These reports are also available at our website, Pfizer.com, in the Investors SEC Filing section.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Jeff Kindler. Jeff?

Jeffrey B. Kindler

Thanks Chuck. And good morning everyone and thanks for joining us. A bedrock principle of this team is that we meet our commitments to our stakeholders, starting with the owners of the company. Since this management team has been fully in place we have met or exceeded every element of the adjusted financial guidance we have provided, despite an extremely dynamic operating and policy environment. The 2009 results we report today continue our adherence to that commitment. Our financial guidance for 2010 reflects our plan to continue to deliver results and meet our commitments. That guidance reflects a careful balance between two critical elements.

First, we continue to drive costs out of the business and improve our productivity in everything we do. We are also making our cost structure more flexible so that we can adjust our costs as needed.

Second, we are making focused, disciplined investments where we see the greatest opportunities for growth, whether in Emerging Markets, Established Products, in-line products, preparing the market for coming launches or in the pipeline.

As a result, we see a portfolio with less risk, continued growth in adjusted earnings per share and more consistent earnings growth over time. In that regard we are also providing today our targets for 2012, which given their long-term nature are necessarily subject to less certainty than our guidance for this year.

We have refined and revised the 2012 targets that we provided, when we announced the Wyeth acquisition based on a thorough bottoms up review of all aspects of our business since we closed the transaction.