Some random thoughts now that we're a week away from the report:
We should be getting closer to a more normal course of doing business – as “normal” as we can be at this point, anyway. Perhaps a better way to put it is we should be close to running at 100% efficiency because:
- Our salespeople out there in the wild
- The higher-level management now in place
- Treatments returning to normal
- The integration well on its way to be completed
In the short term, there will still be volatility from quarter to quarter. In the words of Samira (from Q1/22 earnings call):
The second thing that I will say when it comes to quarter-over-quarter, I'm really not going to comment because there's a couple of things that are that I know. Our top line is going to be lumpy, and it's for multitudes of reasons. This year, we don't know what the COVID impact is going to be. In Canada we're going into summer seeing lightening of rules, everything is great. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, preparing to go into winter. So we don't know what's going to happen.
The second thing and you probably saw that is that we know that we will be transitioning Exelon in June in Brazil and transitioning Exelon in May in Colombia. That in itself is going to cause lumpiness as we make sure that we have the channel have adequate inventory and no disruption in supply.
So lumpiness is going to be there. I, we are working hard to obviously grow our sales and grow our sales not through just selling into the channel but creating demand and Jeff team has done a great job over the last year and we can expect to continue to execute on that.
… and a little bit later in the call she said:
So we don't really guide towards quarters. As we've seen over the last couple of years, seasonality, COVID, the whole -- during this time, it's extremely hard to predict. What our business is driving towards is achieving and hopefully exceeding that $270 million target that we've set out. The quarters will be lumpy for a whole slew of reasons. So we do -- basically, we know that we're going to hit the guidance that we've provided. We don't know how that will phase over the quarters.
The costs are likely to increase... but that's a great thing since this will start adding to the top and bottom lines.
Samira:
So I'll start with the costs and the trend end. As we said, Q1 was a bit -- Q1 we saw treatments advance, but the front half of Q1, there was little to no activity because of Omicron in most of our territories.
In the back half of Q1, we -- everybody went back into the field. Q2, Q3, we do expect travel and field activity to increase, the costs should increase.
Jeff:
... so activities have resumed, the team to Samira's point are investing and we're seeing the return on some of those investments.
Akynzeo will not affect our Q2 results. It will have an effect in Q3. The sales were $7 million in Brazil and Canada in 2021. However, it’s worth noting that oncology treatments have been down for the past couple of years… therefore, combined with the marketing expertise of GUD, I expect Akynzeo to contribute more than $7 million a year (perhaps significantly more) in a normalized environment. Since it’s “highly synergistic,” I don’t expect it to contribute to costs all that much.
But as mentioned, we won’t see this in Q2 results.