AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot Delivers Remarks as Firm Celebrates Transfer to NYSE

Good morning. Good morning. What a day. It's really a pleasure and for me a really great excitement to be here at the New York Stock Exchange. And I'm sure it's a great day of pride for all of us at AstraZeneca. For us as a Swedish-British company originally, to become more American is really so exciting. USA, the land of science and innovation. So, tell us how excited you are to be here today.

Thank you so much for this great introduction and also this great partnership and for studying our numbers, our company so well. I was really interested to hear you say we have 95,000 employees because the first time I hear how many employees we have because it changes all the time. I can get a clear number on our turnover but I can never know exactly how many employees we have. But thank you. Thank you for hosting us here and thank you for being such a great partner and welcoming us here. It really is a fantastic opportunity to launch our company, launch our share here on the New York Stock Exchange and give people in this country access to our company and the growth we offer and the potential opportunities to become a shareholder of this company. I also want to give a special thanks to three of our guests here today. A New Yorker first of all, Natalia Almanza, who will share our story of living with hypertension. We've just launched a product called Baxfendi, a new product, first in class for the patients who have resistant hypertension, patients who tend to have elevated aldosterone. It's an aldosterone synthase inhibitor and this is really going to be a very important product for the treatment of the millions of patients in this country and around the world who suffer from uncontrolled hypertension even though they are on two or three drugs, sometimes four drugs actually. I also want to welcome Dr. Jorge Alina and I hope I pronounce your first name correctly. And thank you so much for participating in our clinical trial and leading the effort to develop Baxfendi. I also want to welcome Dr. Tiffany Trainer who participated in another clinical trial for another of our new medicines called camizestrant for breast cancer. And we are developing with this product not only a new product but also a new way to treat breast cancer. The typical treatment of breast cancer is you treat patients with chemotherapy or some of our new agents and then you wait and you see whether the symptoms return and you treat patients when symptoms return. The way we are, the new algorithm we're introducing is through blood test. We actually try to identify the early return of cancer and we are actually able to identify this months before the symptoms. And as you can imagine, if you can do this, you can retreat and intercept the disease and stop the cancer from progressing. And so we presented data as I was in Chicago with a number of people here in the room this weekend, we presented data there with this new agent. And it's always exciting to be at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. So, thank you for being here.

So, today marks the listing of AstraZeneca on the New York Stock Exchange. We decided to do this because we wanted to become more American for sure and allow American investors to access our shares more directly than ADR. But we also wanted to align our shares across the United States, New York, but also London and Stockholm in Sweden. So that we have a harmonized global listing across the world. And this gives investors not only in this country, but also across the world the opportunity to invest in London, in Stockholm, but also importantly here on the New York Stock Exchange. And our share price has benefited from this.

Yes. And in premarket. Yeah. We were actually lighting candles last night hoping that the share price will not go down this morning. Very good this morning.