A continued strong sales performance, especially for the five key growth products, together with benefits arising from productivity initiatives across the entire company, has produced an outstanding result ... and is reflected in an increase in our financial targets for the full year. |
I'm not at all frightened, ... We are big enough now -- we now have the scale from this merger to compete. |
It's true that it has taken a little bit longer than we expected but that kind of thing happens with regulatory authorities -- nothing unusual in that, |
The history of this division, partly because of the devices element, is that reviews and approvals tend to be very slow, so we made realistic to conservative assumptions on what the review period should be. |
The profile [of the drug] looks tremendous, |
The typical review time in this division, the period to approval, is something like two years, |
We are big enough at this stage to grow our business strongly. I am not ruling out what you may describe as bolt-on acquisitions -- what I am ruling out is a significant merger or anything like that. |
We have no strategic need to be bigger -- none at all. So there is no reason to engage in major M&A activity. |
We will fight in the courts, ... We will argue very strongly that unless a generic manufacturer has discovered its own way that is free of our patents of formulating the product, that they're in breach of our patents. We think we have a good chance of winning. |
We will have 14 new candidate drugs in development this year, so that's a really excellent performance, |
While it is still very early into the launch phase, the first four weeks of prescription data suggests that this could be the fastest ever uptake of a new product in the U.K., |