Hikma Pharmaceuticals (LON:HIK) Results
Can you talk me through the highlights from the results that you're announcing today?
This was, I think, an exceptionally good year for the Hikma Group. Again, the three divisions delivered fantastic performance. Our geographic diversification programme, and diversification overall, played out exactly as we wanted them to be. Revenue was up by 14.8%. Operating profit was up by 26%, so the results are really fantastic. We continued to rollout new products across all the geographies in the different business divisions. We prepared the ground for the Multi-source Baxter acquisition. We hope to finish that within the next four weeks and take that over. So that will be a very transformational for the Injectables business and I have always said that the Injectables business in the future will drive a lot of the growth in the company, so we're delighted that we're going to take that over. We also set the ground for the biosimilars with a deal with the Korean company Celltrion that we hope will keep us the as the leaders in MENA and obviously the leaders in the biosimilars in MENA. So overall, I'm very, very happy with all the divisions, all the results we had, the fantastic growth we had. It was an excellent year for Hikma.
These numbers could seem to be flattered though by a very strong performance at Generics that may not be repeated, so on an underlying basis, how do you think you performed?
Actually, all the divisions did extremely well this year. The Branded division showed low double-digit growth which is very much in line with what we had planned. The margins at the Injectables business went up from 10% to 15%., that's almost a 50% improvement in margins, so we are very happy with those results. The Generic business did exceptionally well. The core business did very, very well. The core products that we have did very well. The…
