Biogen Idec Inc. at Wachovia Healthcare Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

GEORGE FARMER, ANALYST, WACHOVIA CAPITAL MARKETS: Okay, thanks for coming to the final presentation of our conference. I thought it was a great success. Thank you all for coming.

It is my pleasure to introduce Paul Clancy, the CFO of Biogen Idec, who will give us an update on Company progress and outlook for '08, we hope, or as much as you can talk about ahead of earnings.

PAUL CLANCY, EVP, CFO, BIOGEN IDEC, INC.: Thank you. It is great to be here and presenting. As always, I will start with our Safe Harbor statement. This presentation includes forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties in our business that could cause actual results to differ materially from those that we express or imply. I would encourage you all to refer to our filings with the SEC, particularly the Risk Factors section in our forms 10-K and 10-Q for further information.

Additionally, as you probably know, we received a Board of Director nomination and bylaw amendment proposal from one of our shareholders recently. As a result we are obliged, among other things, to inform you of this and to be sure shareholders have access to all the information they might need around this process.

Now, let's move on to our discussion of Biogen Idec's strong historical performance and impressive future growth prospects. I will run through our presentation, talk about our business review and outlook, then I will move on to strategy and fundamentals, and I will wrap up the end of the presentation with our 2008 guidance.

First, let's talk about and provide an overview, an update of Biogen Idec's business at the highest level. I will start off by reviewing our performance since the merger of Biogen and Idec in 2003. As you may recall, when we closed the merger we outlined a number of goals. Included in those goals we stated some financial targets, goals of 15% top-line growth and 20% bottom-line growth.

We are very pleased to say that we have essentially hit these goals as we wrap up 2007. And based on these analyst estimates for 2007 revenue and EPS that are outlined here, we expect revenue to have grown in 2003 from $1.9 billion to over $3.1 billion in 2007; and furthermore expect EPS based on these targets to increase at approximately a 21% compound annual growth rate.

As a reminder, just a little bit more specific, we indicated on January 7 that we expect to exceed our non-GAAP and GAAP per share guidance and be at the top end of our previous guidance range. We expect to report these results for Q4 and full year before the market opens on February 6.

While the historical performance is very impressive, we are equally optimistic regarding our future performance. As we will lay out through this presentation in more detail in coming slides, our goal is to continue, quite simply, the 15% and 20% trajectory through 2010.

That is to say, the goal, our goal, is for top-line revenue growth to grow at 15% on a compound annual growth basis; and bottom-line earnings per share growth to be 20% through 2010. We hope that even at the end of that time period we will have a pipeline that will continue that type of performance going into the next decade.

In addition to the financial goals that we have outlined, we have articulated a number of operating goals as well. This we did in the third quarter of last year, beginning to describe these goals going out into 2010.

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